“To-morrow, at sunrise,” he repeated, taking his lamp to retire to bed, “I’ll see whether this treasure be hid in the wall of the garret.”

“And, as we’re out of wood, Mr. Peter,” said Tabitha, puffing and panting with her late gymnastics, “as fast as you tear the house down I’ll make a fire with the pieces.”

Gorgeous that night were the dreams of Peter Goldthwaite.  At one time he was turning a ponderous key in an iron door not unlike the door of a sepulchre, but which, being opened, disclosed a vault heaped up with gold coin as plentifully as golden corn in a granary.  There were chased goblets, also, and tureens, salvers, dinner-dishes and dish-covers of gold or silver-gilt, besides chains and other jewels, incalculably rich, though tarnished with the damps of the vault; for, of all the wealth that was irrevocably lost to man, whether buried in the earth or sunken in the sea, Peter Goldthwaite had found it in this one treasure-place.  Anon he had returned to the old house as poor as ever, and was received at the door by the gaunt and grizzled figure of a man whom he might have mistaken for himself, only that his garments were of a much elder fashion.  But the house, without losing its former aspect, had been changed into a palace of the precious metals.  The floors, walls and ceilings were of burnished silver; the doors, the window-frames, the cornices, the balustrades and the steps of the staircase, of pure gold; and silver, with gold bottoms, were the chairs, and gold, standing on silver legs, the high chests of drawers, and silver the bedsteads, with blankets of woven gold and sheets of silver tissue.  The house had evidently been transmuted by a single touch, for it retained all the marks that Peter remembered, but in gold or silver instead of wood, and the initials of his name—­which when a boy he had cut in the wooden door-post—­remained as deep in the pillar of gold.  A happy man would have been Peter Goldthwaite except for a certain ocular deception which, whenever he glanced backward, caused the house to darken from its glittering magnificence into the sordid gloom of yesterday.

Up betimes rose Peter, seized an axe, hammer and saw which he had placed by his bedside, and hied him to the garret.  It was but scantily lighted up as yet by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam which began to glimmer through the almost opaque bull-eyes of the window.  A moralizer might find abundant themes for his speculative and impracticable wisdom in a garret.  There is the limbo of departed fashions, aged trifles of a day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of men, and which passed to the garret when that generation passed to the grave—­not for safekeeping, but to be out of the way.  Peter saw piles of yellow and musty account-books in parchment covers, wherein creditors long dead and buried had written the names of dead and buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-grown tombstones were more legible.  He found old moth-eaten garments,