Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

RAVENS HOE. E
CHAPTER I.
AN ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILY OF RAVENSHOE.
I HAD intended to have gone into a family history of the Ravenshoes, from the time of Canute to that of her present Majesty,
following it down through every change and revolution, both
secular and religious; which would have been deeply interesting,
but which would have taken more hard reading than one cares
to undertake for nothing. I had meant, I say, to have been quite
diffuse on the annals of one of our oldest commoner families; but,
on going into the subject, I found I must either chronicle little
affairs which ought to have been forgotten long ago, or do my
work in a very patchy and inefficient way. When I say that the
Ravenshoes have been engaged in every plot, rebellion, and civil
war, from about a century or so before the Conquest to 1745,
and that the history of the house is marked by cruelty and rapacity in old times, and in those more modern by political tergiversation of the blackest dye, the reader will understand why I
hesitate to say too much in reference to a name which I especially
honor. In order, however, that I may give some idea of what
the hereditary character of the family is, I must just lead the
reader's eye lightly over some of the principal events of their
history.
The great Irish families have, as is well known, a banshee, or
familiar spirit, who, previous to misfortune or death, flits moaning round the ancestral castle. Now, although the Ravenshoes,
like all respectable houses, have an hereditary lawsuit; a feud
(with the Humbys of Hele); a ghost (which the present Ravenshoe claims to have repeatedly seen in early youth); and a
buried treasure; yet I have never heard that they had a banshee. Had such been the case, that unfortunate spirit would
have had no sinecure of it, but rather must have kept howling
night and day for nine hundred years or so, in order to have got
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