Now it did not
matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of
my letters from Foxden, "_upon either hypothesis_, the relationship of
the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively
established."
And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!
Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in
the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a
certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait
in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had
given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That
brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior
Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob,
those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms,
above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American
rudeness like a smiling Phoebus from British skies,--how could all
these things, which had so individualized the natural body of Sir Joseph
Barley, be dispensed with in its spiritual counterpart? No answer to
such question,--only the grim facts, that one brother more had "gone
over to the majority," and that the living minority got on very
comfortably without him.
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