University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.

WERE I to imitate the action of an epic poem, it
would now be the time to give the history of the Governor,
before he was a Governor, and had set out upon his
travels; deducing my narrative from his early years.
His ancestry also might be touched upon; but the fact
is, as I have said, I know little about him prior to the
time of his setting out; and still less of his descent, and
pedigree. I should be better pleased if I had it in my
power to give some account of the progenitors of Teague,
as being a character of greater singularity; but that is
not in my power. From his ambition for eminence, I
should think it very probable that his descent was noble,
and from some of the old Irish kings, if the heraldry
could be traced; but, in the sacking of towns, and burning
of castles in the civil wars in Ireland, and foreign
conquests by Danes, and by John Bull, all documents of
ancestry have been lost; so that we are at liberty to imagine
what we please upon this head. Philosophers dispute
with each other; but the divines all agree that we
all came from Adam. If the divines are right, we are
all relations, tag rag, and bobtail; kings, emperors, and
bog-trotters. I am content to have it so; for it is a way
of thinking, favourable to benevolence; and I do not
know that I should gain any thing by the idea of there
having been different stocks; for though I should get
quit of some rascals, that have sprung from Adam, I
might have others on my hand not much better. The
truth is, I know nothing of my own ancestry, farther back
than the year 1715, where a certain M'Donald did good
service with his claymore at the battle of Killicrankey,
under Dundee. He was the grand father of my father,
by the maternal line. I mention him, because he is the
only one I have ever heard spoken of as being a dead-doing
man. My father's father, called out in a conscription
of feudalists under Argyle, fell at the battle of Culloden;
and this is all I know of him.

It has occurred to me sometimes, that coming from
a remote island, and an obscure part of it, I might feign
an ancestry with coats of arms, as others have done.
The bracken, or brecken, as it is indifferently spelled by
the Scottish poets, is the most beautiful ever-green of that

part of the island; and might furnish something towards
an escutcheon. The brecken is introduced by Burns, as
an ornament of Caledonia.

The ridge, o' green brecken, would have done as well
as the glen; for it grows on the ridge as well as in the
valley, which is the meaning of the word glen, a narrow
valley, overhung by a ridge on each side; and so lone
or lonely; that is, wild and romantic, by the small stream
murmuring through it. This is the origin of the name
breckan, or brackenridge. But I am running off at a
tangent, and wandering from my subject. Having nothing
to say of the ancestry of the Governor, or of that of
the bog-trotter, I must omit, or rather cannot accomplish
the dramatic form of the epic, but must proceed in a
prosaic way with the narrative, a parte post, and say nothing
of the exparte ante.

The Governor was thinking of a lady for his castle, or
mansion house; but does not seem to have succeeded;
for he remains yet unmarried. Teague, as we have seen,
had been heretofore much in request with the ladies;

and still more so from the late reputation of his generalship,
and the display of his tumbling at the camp-meetings
But the circumstance of his having taught a cat
to speak, was against him; for no woman would like to
have a tell-tale of such domestic animal. It would render
it unsafe to have a cat about the house.