Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/406

398 strand in the thread of our history, there is a very great number proportionally of warlike weapons.

I like to read old books, both ex officio and ex naturâ. But I need not enlarge upon this liking. For my part, however, they please me most when I am wholly alone, in that deep silence which by listening you can seem to hear, and in a place well furnished,—especially in such a place as the Historical Library is, with many full bookshelves, and a great multitude of ancient portraits, grim curiosities, and weapons of war.

It may be unfortunate to be sensitive, but I am. The few things that do excite me excite me easily, and by virtue of the trooping together and thronging on of the procession of my own imaginations, thus awakened, I am prone to reveries of the most various complexion.

In one of the secret repositories where during his latter years my venerable predecessor used with senile cunning to hide, indiscriminately, the coins of the Romans and of the Yankees, rags, bottles of rhubarb and magnesia, books, papers, and buttons, I had found, one night, an ancient MS. I had been all the evening reading a High-German MiddleAge volume, illustrated with wood-cuts, cut as with a hatchet, and being, as per title-page, Julius der erste Römische Kayser, von seinen Kriegen,—"Julius the first Roman Emperor, of his Wars."

Buried in the extraordinary adventures of the Kayser, not to be found in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that the last folios were missing.

After a moment of ineffectual vexation, I bethought me of several repositories in which I had seen portions of débris,—leaves, covers, brazen bosses, and other membra disjecta; in one of these I might very probably find the missing pages.

I fumbled through half a dozen ; did not find what I sought, but did find the aforesaid MS. I was interested at once by the close but clear penmanship, and by the date, February 29, 165½; for this day, by its numeral, would be in leap-year, according to old style, but not according to new. How did they settle it ? I asked ; and what was to determine for lovelorn maidens, whether they might or might not use the privilege of the year?

I returned to my desk, and sat down to read; and, as I remember, the heavy bell of the First Church, close by, just then struck eleven, and I listened with pleasure to the long, mellow cadence of the reverberations after each deliberate and solid stroke.

Beginning at the beginning, I read until past midnight. The contents, after all, were not remarkable. It was a collection of copies of papers relating to various matters of accounts and law, all pertaining to a certain Beardsley family, of high and ancient fame in the Colony, and afterwards in the State. Somewhat beyond the middle, however, I lighted upon a document which attracted my more particular attention. It was a transcript from the State Records, and, AS the date showed, from a very early volume of them, now missing from the office of the Secretary of State. It immediately occurred to me that this volume was strongly suspected to have been purloined by one Isaac Beardsley, an unscrupulous man, of some influence, who used, for amusement, to potter about in various antiquarian enterprises of no moment, but who had now been dead for some fifteen years. I then also recollected that he had an only child, a graceless gallows-bird of a son, who broke his father’s heart, then wasted his substance in riotous living, and, after being long a disgrace and nuisance at home, had sunk out of sight amid the lowest strata of vice and crime in New York.

The document was a complaint to the "Generall Court" against "Goodman Joab Brice"—the complainant being designated by the honorable prefix of "Mr."— "for yt hee, the sd Goodman Brice, had sayd in ye hearing of" various persons