as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in
the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblance
that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in the
hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was a
full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some stray
Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,
facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,
with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a
black Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the corner
of the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date
1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the small
portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at
least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of
Charles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were
the same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thin
cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of
expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional
manner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the
same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her
descendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were
both descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon
saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her
ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay,
that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.

"You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and her