"I never could quite make out what kind of fishes these are," said the
Rev. John Stalworth. "They are certainly not pike which formed the
emblematic blazon of the Hotofts, and are still grim enough to
frighten future Shakspeares on the scutcheon of the Warwickshire
Lucys."

"I believe they are tenches," said Mr. Mivers. "The tench is a fish
that knows how to keep itself safe by a philosophical taste for an
obscure existence in deep holes and slush."

SIR PETER.--"No, Mivers; the fishes are dace, a fish that, once
introduced into any pond, never can be got out again. You may drag
the water; you may let off the water; you may say, 'Those dace are
extirpated,'--vain thought!--the dace reappear as before; and in this
respect the arms are really emblematic of the family. All the
disorders and revolutions that have occurred in England since the
Heptarchy have left the Chillinglys the same race in the same place.
Somehow or other the Norman Conquest did not despoil them; they held
fiefs under Eudo Dapifer as peacefully as they had held them under
King Harold; they took no part in the Crusades, nor the Wars of the
Roses, nor the Civil Wars between Charles the First and the
Parliament. As the dace sticks to the water and the water sticks by
the dace, so the Chillinglys stuck to the land and the land stuck by
the Chillinglys. Perhaps I am wrong to wish that the new Chillingly
may be a little less like a dace."

"Oh!" cried Miss Margaret, who, mounted on a chair, had been
inspecting the pedigree through an eye-glass, "I don't see a fine
Christian name from the beginning, except Oliver."