CHAPTER IX.
FAMILY PORTRAITS.
ONE day a very grand and, as she conceived, original idea came into my grandmothers head. She was resolved to represent pictorially, on a sheet of cartridge-paper, all the confluent streams of blood in her children's veins, of the families to which they were entitled to draw blood through past alliances.
So my grandmother got out her ruler and colour-box, and a pallet and brushes, and filled a little glass with water. Presently a pedigree was drawn out by the aid of compasses and a parallel ruler. Then she rubbed her paints and set to work colouring. She dabbed some vermilion on Father A, and gamboge on Mother B; then on the next in the same generation, Father C, she put sage-green; and his wife, Mother D, she indicated with Prussian blue. The son of vermilion A and gamboge B was R. That was simple enough; in his arteries flowed a vivid tide of combined vermilion and gamboge. He married S, who was the offspring of sage-green C and Prussian blue D; consequently her arteries were flowing with rather a dingy mixture of sage-green and Prussian blue. Now R and S had a child, P, and his veins were charged with a combination of vermilion and gamboge and sage-green and Prussian blue.
When my grandmother had got so far, she bit the end of her paint-brush; for P, who was her husband's father, of course married, and her mother-in-law must be also represented by a combination of four colours. She took the end of the brush out of her mouth and rubbed emerald green and carmine. E and F should symbolize her husband's mother's grandparents. E brought into the family a stream of carmine blood, and F one of vivid emerald. Then the veins of her step-mother represented a mixed tide of carmine and emerald and of two other families, as yet unindicated. To these she promptly appropriated violet and orange. Now at last was she able to tabulate the constituents of her husband's blood; it was composed of minute rills of vermilion, gamboge, sage-green, Prussian blue, carmine, emerald green, violet, and orange. Already she had trenched on the composite colours. Now a great dismay fell on my grandmother; for she had to complete the same process for the exemplification of her own blood; and for her ancestry not only were no primary colours left, but even no secondary. She had to represent them with brown, lavender, slate,—yes, oh joy! there was another blue, cobalt!—verdegris, lemon yellow, black, and white. She hesitated some while before employing the verdegris. She never completed that table; for she was aghast at the rivers of mud, literal mud, which, according to her scheme, flowed through the arteries of her offspring. Now look at this table. Consider, it is only one of a pedigree through five generations.