t purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood
which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless
scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as
materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former
commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely
merchants,--old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and
many another magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was
scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain pile of wealth began to
dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty
and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much
posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon
as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the King's officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the
Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the
names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on 'Change, nor
very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity,--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of
the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only
Salem knew the way thither,--I chanced to lay my hand on a small
package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.
This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long
past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more
substantial materials than at present. There was something about it
that quickened an inst