carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a
strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and
constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.

At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been
Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French
woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal
servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the
nineteenth century.

A questionable privilege, perhaps.

But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought
to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail
and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the
telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her
nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.

Thus we took _la belle Verriere_ by turns, and she saw and heard things
she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to
share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."

And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice
person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could
not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each
of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us,
and as many great-great-grandfathers.

Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us
what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at