Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/220

192 in search of more hieroglyphs; but in that whole time he did not publish more than a half dozen short articles regarding his discoveries, reserving all for a book which he intended to be a monument to his labors. His passion for perfection prevented him from ever completing that book, and, on his deathbed, he intrusted its completion and publication to me. Two years ago I began preparing it for the stenographer, and last week I had the satisfaction of feeling that my work was nearly finished. The material consisted of a huge mass of papers. They contained chapters written by my father which I am incapable of rewriting; tracings and photographs of the inscriptions which can be duplicated only by years of labor; original documents which are irreplaceable; notes of which I have no other copies. They represented, as you yourself have just said, almost sixty years of continuous labor. Last Wednesday afternoon, while I was absent, the whole mass of these papers was taken from the cabinet where I kept them, and burned—or if not burned, they have completely vanished."

He stopped short in his walk, turned on Trant a face which had grown suddenly livid, and stretched out his hands.

"They were destroyed, Trant—destroyed! Mysteriously, inexplicably, purposelessly!" his helpless indignation burst from his constraint. "The destruction of papers such as these could not possibly have benefited anyone. They were without value or interest except to scientists; and as to envious or malicious