deceive, were it supposable, would
have to be of recent date.

Now let me show that an intention to deceive could not be of recent date,
and at the same time we shall see the need of this minuteness of
explanation. Notice, then, that the manuscript comes directly from the
lady who says she found it in a trunk of her family's private papers. A
prominent paper-maker in Boston has examined it and says that, while its
age cannot be certified to from its texture, its leaves are of three
different kinds of paper, each of which might be a hundred years old. But,
bluntly, this lady, though a person of literary tastes and talent, who
recognized the literary value of Alix's _history_, esteemed original
_documents_ so lightly as, for example, to put no value upon Louisa
Cheval's thrilling letter to her brother. She prized this Alix manuscript
only because, being a simple, succinct, unadorned narrative, she could use
it, as she could not Francoise's long, pretty story, for the foundation of
a nearly threefold expanded romance. And this, in fact, she had written,
copyrighted, and arranged to publish when our joint experience concerning
Francoise's manuscript at length readjusted her sense of values. She sold
me the little Alix manuscript at a price still out of all proportion below
her valuation of her own writing, and counting it a mistake that the
expanded romance should go unpreferred and unpublished.

But who, then, wrote the smaller manuscript? Madame found it, she says, in
the possession of her very aged mother, the daughter and namesake of
Francoise. Surely she was not its author; it is she who said she burned
almost the whole original draft of Francoise's "Voyage," because it was
"in the way and smelt bad." Neither could Francoise have written it. Her
awkward handwriting, her sparkling flood of words and details, and her
ignorance of the simplest rules of spelling, make it impossible. Nor could
Suzanne have done it. She wrote and spelled no better at fifty-nine than
Francoise at forty-three. Nor could any one have imposed it on either of
the sisters. So, then, we find no intention to deceive, either early or
recent. I translated the manuscript, it went to the magazine, and I sat
down to eat, drink, and revel, never dreaming that the brazen water-gates
of my Babylon were standing wide open.

For all this time two huge, glaring anachronisms were staring me, and half
a dozen other persons, squarely in the face, and actually es