lishing a correspondence. Old sermons, moral
obituaries of public characters, celebrations of centennial
anniversaries, and heavy reading of like description, constantly left
the Foxden Post-Office addressed to the British Museum. The printed
formulas of acknowledgment which arrived in return were preserved as the
rarest treasures.

And in fulness of time all this corresponding and presenting produced a
glorious result. Elijah Prowley, of Foxden, was chosen an Honorary
Member of the Royal Society of British Sextons,--an association than
which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was
glory enough for any Western genealogist,--yet Fortune had a higher
gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the
High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel
Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a
rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an
elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, a jockeying of the
wits of very old women, and a raid into divers registers, scrolls,
schedules, archives, and the like,--Sir Joseph Barley, I say, turned out
to be _a long-lost cousin_. "Barley," it appeared, had anciently been
written "Parley," and "Praley," and even "Proley." Having arrived at
this point, Sir Joseph conjectured that his ancestor Proley might have
dropped a _w_ out of his name, and the Colonel conjectured that his
progenitor, the Puritan, might have put one into his. Now it did not
matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of
my letters from Foxden, "_upon either hypothesis_, the relationship of
the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively
established."

And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!

Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in
the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a
certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait
in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had
given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That
brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior
Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob,
those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms,
above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American
rudeness like a smiling Phoebus from British skies,--how