conceited
coxcombs. But she was really a most interesting girl, with much of her
father's spirit, resolution, and ability. Her affection for him was only
exceeded by his for her. True, their lives were centred in each other
too much. But it was very beautiful to behold.

Such was the condition of Burnsville, and such the situation of Joel
Burns, when Hiram Meeker sought to remove to that place and enter his
service.

A MERCHANT'S STORY.

'All of which I saw, and part of which I was.'

CHAPTER I.

It is a dingy old sign. It has hung there in sun and rain till its
letters are faint and its face is furrowed. It has looked down on a
generation that has passed away, and seen those who placed it there go
out of that doorway never to return; still it clings to that dingy old
warehouse, and still Russell, Rollins & Co. is signed in that dingy old
counting-room at the head of the stairway. It is known the world over.
It is heard of on the cotton-fields of Texas, in the cane-brakes of
Cuba, and amid the rice-swamps of Carolina. The Chinaman speaks of it as
he sips his tea and handles his chop-sticks in the streets of Canton,
and the half-naked negro rattles its gold as he gathers palm-oil and the
copal-gum on the western coast of Africa. Its plain initials, painted in
black on a white ground, float from tall masts over many seas, and its
simple 'promise to pay,' scrawled in a bad hand on a narrow strip of
paper, unlocks the vaults of the best bankers in Europe. And yet, it is
a dingy old sign! Men look up to it as they pass by, and wonder that a
cracked, weather-beaten board that would not sell for a dollar, should
be counted 'good for a million.'

It is a dingy old warehouse, with narrow, dark, cobwebbed windows, and
wide, rusty iron shutters, which, as the bleak November wind sweeps up
old Long Wharf, swing slowly on their hinges with a sharp, grating
creak. I heard them in my boyhood. Perched on a tall stool at that old
desk, I used to listen, in the long winter-nights, to those strange,
wild cries, till I fancied they were voices of the uneasy dead, come
back to take the vacant seats beside me, and to pace again, with ghostly
tread, the floor of that dark old counting-room. They were ever a
mystery and a terror to me; but they never creaked so harshly, or cried
so wildly, as on a bleak November night, not many years ago, when I
turned my steps, for the last time, up the trembling old stairway.

It was just