The portents peculiar to some old families are a heritage from those more hazardous days when the Spanish Main, with its lure of gold and adventure, awoke the rover in the breast of many a fine fellow. John of Oxenham, of Drake's Goodlie Company, was one of these. At Oxhenham House, the ancestral home of the Oxenhams, the coming of a white-breasted dove wa s the woeful omen connected with the absent head of the house. Suddenly it would appear fluttering at a window, stilling spindle and wheel, to vanish as suddenly as it had come.
The portents peculiar to some old families are a heritage from those more hazardous days when the Spanish Main, with its lure of gold and adventure, awoke the rover in the breast of many a fine fellow. John of Oxenham, of Drake's Goodlie Company, was one of these. At Oxhenham House, the ancestral home of the Oxenhams, the coming of a white-breasted dove wa s the woeful omen connected with the absent head of the house. Suddenly it would appear fluttering at a window, stilling spindle and wheel, to vanish as suddenly as it had come.