of the new! Here was
evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber
had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. The manuscript passed
into my possession, our Creole lady-correspondent reiterating to the end
her inability to divine what could be wanted with "an almost illegible
scrawl" (griffonage), full of bad spelling and of rather inelegant
diction. But if old manuscript was the object of desire, why, here was
something else; the very document alluded to by Francoise in her memoir of
travel--the autobiography of the dear little countess, her beloved Alix de
Morainville, made fatherless and a widow by the guillotine in the Reign of
Terror.

"Was that all?" inquired my agent, craftily, his suspicions aroused by the
promptness with which the supply met the demand. "Had she not other old
and valuable manuscripts?"

"No, alas! Only that one."

Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me now, in an
inner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its little tight-fitting
bag, or case of a kind of bright, large-flowered silken stuff not made in
these days, and its outer wrapper of discolored brief-paper; a pretty
little document of sixty-eight small pages in a feminine hand, perfect in
its slightly archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of its
flimsy yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix de
Morainville ecrite a la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795. Pour mes cheres amies,
Suzanne et Francoise Bossier."

One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard
University. He generously offered to see if he could find the name of the
Count de Morainville on any of the lists of persons guillotined during the
French Revolution. He made the search, but wrote, "I am sorry to say that
I have not been able to find it either in Prudhomme, 'Dictionnaire des
Individues envoyes a la Mort judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the list
given by Wallon in the sixth volume of his very interesting 'Histoire du
Tribunal Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death in
Paris," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some hours'
further search, but in vain.

Here was distress. I turned to the little manuscript roll of which I had
become so fond, and searched its pages anew for evidence of either
genuineness or its opposite. The wrapper of black paper and the
close-fitting silken bag had not been sufficient to keep it from taking on
t