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 THE ANCESTOR 47 no longer to us for the occasion, but may be darkly hinted at as ^ the first,' ' the second/ or ^ the third,' as the case may be. No ancient rule or modern reason exists for this bemusing of our sentence, and therefore if we have need to say ' gules ' a twenty times in describing some new devised shield's tangled patchwork let us say ' gules ' boldly for the twentieth time without stopping to track back with the thumbnail to recall whether gules was introduced as our first or fourth colour. Of the long list of furs remain but vair, and ermine with its black tails upon white, and its reverse with white tails upon black, which is however so rare a device in ancient heraldry that some doubt exists as to what it should be styled. ' Er- mines ' as the handbooks have it, is an impossible description, not only because the word is too near to ' ermine ' in sound, but because it was actually the form used for ' ermine ' in nearly all the earlier English blazons, ' erminees ' being the word then used for the white upon black. Erminois and pean, counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, are words which we shall not encounter in our heraldry book of the future. The cheeky or checkered field remains, and gobony must still be the word when a bend baston or fesse is measured into lengths of two alternating colours, but we may rid ourselves of counter-compony^ for to the old painters a chief was a checkered chief, whether the checks ran in a pattern of two rows of checkers or three or four. When we come to part our shield in colours the ancient armory will save us from some latinisms. Waldegrave's shield, parted down the midst in two colours, was blazoned as ' party silver and gules,' and party per pale is a redundancy of the later time. How then, it will be asked, was party per pale dis- tinguished from party per fesse ? It may be answered that party per fesse had no existence. A chief is the upper part of the shield and not necessarily the ' third part ' of the hand- books. It may be narrow when the field below is filled with charges, it may be wide when it bears charges itself, and when (as in the arms of Fenwick) field and chief are both fiUed with charges it is wider stiU and assumes the appear- ance which the later writers, eager for a new entry in their dictionaries, styled ' party per fesse.' In this case, as in the case of all of the ^ ordinaries,' the size or breadth, whether of chief, bend, cheveron or border, depends not upon the measuring tapes of the rules but upon the eye of the artist D