I
chose to spend my holiday in a visit to my maternal grandmother, who
then lived at Cracow in Galicia. She was at that time, I believe, as
bright and perky as she had ever been, and was interested in
everything. Twelve years before she had married for the second time a
man of her own age after having been a widow for close on thirty years.
It appears that she and her second husband, a first cousin, had been in
love with each other when she was fifteen, and with the consent of
their parents had become engaged. But the young man fell ill and the
doctors pronounced him incurable. The engagement was broken off. My
grandmother married the man who became my grandfather, and a few years
later her first sweetheart, not yet dead, married also. It was
therefore over fifty years before their first idyll was crowned with
matrimony, and then they must have had between them in children,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren a progeny of some two hundred
souls. The venerable ancestors came in for a good deal of criticism
from their descendants, but they did not care a jot and lived happily
together for fifteen years more.
It
was a wonderful love story, or would have been if the old man, on my
grandmother's death, had not within the year taken as his third wife a
buxom young widow. There was no issue from that marriage, as there
might well have been, for he was a lusty and virile old man from all
accounts, a good trencherman, a good sport, and game to the last.
A visitor at my grandmother's house told me that there was a wonderful old cloister and nunnery some miles from
