orary ones. He was simple and almost
penurious in personal expenditure; yet, besides a great collection of
books, he had, from his scanty income, got together, in the course of
a long life, a large and very valuable collection of coins and medals,
especially rich in gold. These coins lay--they do not now, for I assure
you I keep them pretty carefully out of sight latterly--luxuriously
imbedded in a neat case, among the great collection of antique objects,
weapons, ornaments, furniture, clothing, etc., which usually accumulate
within the precincts of an Historical Society's Library.

In the one under my charge there is an astonishing number of them; and
naturally, where the long series of the ancient Indian wars, and later
ones with civilized foes, form together so strong a strand in the thread
of our history, there is a very great number proportionally of warlike
weapons.

I like to read old books, both _ex officio_ and _ex natura_. But I need
not enlarge upon this liking. For my part, however, they please me most
when I am wholly alone, in that deep silence which by listening you can
seem to hear, and in a place well furnished,--especially in such a place
as the Historical Library is, with many full bookshelves, and a great
multitude of ancient portraits, grim curiosities, and weapons of war.

It may be unfortunate to be sensitive, but I am. The few things that do
excite me excite me easily, and by virtue of the trooping together and
thronging on of the procession of my own imaginations, thus awakened, I
am prone to reveries of the most various complexion.

In one of the secret repositories where during his latter years
my venerable predecessor used with senile cunning to hide,
indiscriminately, the coins of the Romans and of the Yankees, rags,
bottles of rhubarb and magnesia, books, papers, and buttons, I had
found, one night, an ancient MS. I had been all the evening reading a
High-German Middle-Age volume, illustrated with wood-cuts, cut as with
a hatchet, and being, as per title-page, _Julius der erste Roemische
Kayser, von seinen Kriegen_,--"Julius the first Roman Emperor, of his
Wars."

Buried in the extraordinary adventures of the Kayser, not to be found
in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the
ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that the last
folios were missing.

After a moment of ineffectual vexation, I bethought me of several
repositories in which I