One or both of the two brothers who, with their half-sister, represented the family in 1810, rode in on every week-day to their Bank-office in Axcester High Street,--a Georgian house of brick, adorned with a porch of plaster fluted to the shape of a sea-shell, out of which a.

Cupid smiled down upon a brass plate and the inscription "WESTCOTE AND WESTCOTE," and on the first floor, with windows as tall as the rooms, so that from the street you could see through one the shapely legs of Mr.Endymion Westcote at his knee-hole table, and through another the legs of Mr.Narcissus.

The third and midmost window was a dummy, having been bricked up to avoid the window-tax imposed by Mr.Pitt--in whose statesmanship, however, the brothers had firmly believed.

Their somewhat fantastic names were traditional in the Westcote pedigree and dated from, the seventeenth century.
Endymion, the elder, (who took the lead of Narcissus in all, things), was the fine flower of the Westcote stocks, and, out of question, the most influential man in Axcester and for many a mile round justice of the Peace for the county of Somerset and Major of its Yeomanry, he served "our town," (so he called it) as Overseer of the Poor, Governor of the Grammar School, Chairman of Feoffees, Churchwarden, everything in short but Mayor--an office which he left to the tradesmen, while taking care to speak of it always with respect, and indeed to see it properly filled.

The part of County Magistrate--to which he had been born--he played to perfection, and with a full sense of its dignified amenity.