“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 the yellowness of age.  It was at least no modern counterfeit.  Presently I noticed the total absence of quotation marks from its passages of conversation.  Now, at the close of the last century, the use of quotation marks was becoming general, but had not become universal and imperative.  Their entire absence from this manuscript of sixty-eight pages, abounding in conversations, meant either age or cunning pretense.  But would a pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time, lay it away in a trunk of old papers, lie down and die without mentioning it, and leave it for some one in the second or third generation afterward to find?  I turned the leaves once more, and lo! one leaf that had had a large corner torn off had lost that much of its text; it had been written upon before it was torn; while on another torn leaf, for there are two, the writing reads—­as you shall see—­uninterruptedly around the torn edge; the writing has been done after the corner was torn off.  The two rents, therefore, must have occurred at different times; for the one which mutilates the text is on the earlier page and surely