“You were born, I believe, in our county,” he said; “perhaps, therefore, you may have heard at some time of a curious old prophecy about our family, which is still preserved among the traditions of Wincot Abbey?”

“I have heard of such a prophecy,” I answered, “but I never knew in what terms it was expressed. It professed¹ to predict the extinction² of your family, or something of that sort, did it not?”

“No inquiries,” he went on, “have traced back that prophecy to the time when it was first made; none of our family records tell us anything of its origin. Old servants and old tenants³ of ours remember to have heard it from their fathers and grandfathers. The monks⁴, whom we succeeded in the Abbey in Henry the Eighth’s time, got knowledge of it in some way, for I myself discovered the rhymes, in which we know the prophecy to have been preserved from a very remote period, written on a blank leaf of one of the Abbey manuscripts. These are the verses, if verses they deserve to be called:

When in Wincot vault⁵ a place
Waits for one of Monkton’s race —
When that one forlorn shall lie
Graveless under open sky,
Beggared of six feet of earth,
Though lord of acres from his birth —
That shall be a certain sign
Of the end of Monkton’s line.
Dwindling⁶ ever faster, faster,
Dwindling to the last-left master;
From mortal ken⁷, from light of day,
Monkton’s race shall pass away.”

“The prediction seems almost vague enough to have been uttered by an ancient oracle,” said I, observing that he waited, after repeating the verses, as if expecting me to say something.

“Vague or not, it is being accomplished,” he returned. “I am now the ‘last-left master’— the last of that elder line of our family at which the prediction points; and the

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