ng dishevelled on the pillow. They
called to him; but still there was no answer. Then they became alarmed,
and hurried home. Some men came up, broke open the door, and found him
dead. Without sickness, or premonition of any kind, he had calmly passed
away.

They dug his grave by the side of the cottage, and laid him in it, with
his feet to the east and his head to the west; and left him to rest there,
unknown and unnamed in death, as he had been in life. The whole village,
men, and women, and children, mourned for him many days. But when the days
of lamentation were ended, and they saw his face no more, though their
grief abated, his memory did not, and has not yet passed from their
hearts.

I observed the voice of my hostess to falter more than once, while telling
this simple and dream-like story of her childhood. I could see by the
night-lights too that her bright eyes sometimes became brighter and
sometimes dimmer; both of which circumstances made it only the more
pleasant for me to sit and listen to her words.

'There were no letters,' she said, found in his possession from which
they could learn his name. There were no writings of any kind, except a
bundle of old papers, which she had looked into, but they seemed to be
only disconnected thoughts and memoranda of events and feelings, and threw
no light on his history. At my request she produced a lamp and spread out
the papers on the table. I turned over the worn and time-stained
manuscripts; but the leaves were loose, unnumbered, and put together at
random, and it was some time before I could find a place to begin at.

At length, however, I managed to bring a few sheets in juxtaposition,
such, that with a little stretch of the imagination I could discern a
slight connection between them. And thus, by dim lamp-light, alone, with
the silence of night around, and the old house lifting up its dark and
shadowy form in the distance, I read some of the old man's papers.

Those which I read I took the liberty of putting into my portmanteau,
arguing that though they might be of no use to me, they certainly would be
of none to their present possessors. Some of these papers having appeared
in the KNICKERBOCKER, and met with 'acceptance bounteous,' I am induced to
transcribe for the edification of the reader, a portion of the
autobiography of the writer. It is contained in the last chapter, or
sheet, and is written in a different and more aged hand than the rest; and
give