of one are avenged, it may be a century after, upon the person of another of the name.  This was the truth which underlay the vast gloomy fables of the ancient Fates, and the stories of the inevitable destruction of the great ancient houses of Greece.  It is the same which the Indian feels when he revenges upon one of the white race the wrongs inflicted by another.  Succession in time does not interfere with the stern promise of Jehovah to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.—­The reader will see presently how I have been led into this train of reflection.

My predecessor in office had a strong fancy for Numismatology.  I have, too; nobody would more enjoy a vast collection of coins; but, oddly enough, I should prefer contemporary 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.