are
to come after me. How many times I have heard her quote the line about
blessings brightening as they take their flight, and how true it proves
in many little ways that one never thinks of until it is too late.

The Register of Deeds is not himself advanced in years. But he borrows
an air of antiquity from the ancient records which are stored in his
sepulchral archives. I love to go to his ossuary of dead transactions,
as I would visit the catacombs of Rome or Paris. It is like wandering
up the Nile to stray among the shelves of his monumental folios. Here
stands a series of volumes, extending over a considerable number of
years, all of which volumes are in his handwriting. But as you go
backward there is a break, and you come upon the writing of another
person, who was getting old apparently, for it is beginning to be a
little shaky, and then you know that you have gone back as far as the
last days of his predecessor. Thirty or forty years more carry you to
the time when this incumbent began the duties of his office; his hand
was steady then; and the next volume beyond it in date betrays the work
of a still different writer. All this interests me, but I do not see how
it is going to interest my reader. I do not feel very happy about the
Register of Deeds. What can I do with him? Of what use is he going to be
in my record of what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table? The
fact of his being one of the boarders was not so important that I was
obliged to speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my
imagination and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another
guest might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.

I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my hands,
and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible. One always
comes across people in actual life who have no particular business to
be where we find them, and whose right to be at all is somewhat
questionable.

I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out of
the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to be to
me in my record. I have often found, however, that the Disposer of men
and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns
and other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the
ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that
any one fish may be considered a supernumerary. But when Capt