be close at hand.  On the evening in question Mickley was alone in his workshop, engaged in repairing a musical instrument.  He had then been living entirely alone for a number of years.  A single servant, who provided his meals, had gone home.  About nine o’clock the loud barking of his dog in the yard below called him to the window.  It was afterward found that a pair of old shoes thrown from an upper room by the burglars had thus called away the attention both of dog and master from what was going on inside.  An hour later a caller discovered several pieces of money lying in the hall.  An investigation disclosed the startling loss which he had sustained.  The entire contents of the piano-box had been carried off.  A private desk had also been broken open and despoiled of a few medals, although its chief contents were intact.  A gold pencil, the gift of Ole Bull, and other keepsakes, remained undisturbed.  But the larger portion of a collection of foreign coins, one of the most complete in the world, and the product of a lifetime’s intelligent research, was gone!

It was a heavy calamity, and one from which the old collector never fully recovered.  Sir Isaac Newton’s historic Fido did not do nearly the amount of irremediable damage when he overturned the lamp upon his master’s papers.  The actual pecuniary loss, reckoning at cost prices, was in the neighborhood of nineteen thousand dollars.  The market value of such a collection was of course vastly greater, and increasing all the time at a good deal faster rate than compound interest.  It was somewhat of a coincidence that Mr. Mickley had received and refused what he records as a “tempting offer”, for the entire collection only a short time before the robbery.

The ardent passion of a lifetime was now chilled, and his one desire seemed to be to get rid of his remaining coins and of the responsibility which keeping them entailed.  Such, however, was the completeness of Mickley’s literary methods of condensing, that an entry of three or four lines made in his diary on the night of the robbery is all that he had to write about the appalling loss.  A week or two afterward he records in the same volume the disposal of all the remaining coins, with an air of great relief, as he adds, “I do not doubt I should be robbed again if I kept them.”  A large box full of the most valuable had been taken, for safe-keeping, to the Mint just after the robbery; but these were sold with the rest.  It is understood that this remnant of the original lot was disposed of for about sixteen thousand dollars, the largest purchaser being Mr, Woodward, of Roxbury, Massachusetts.  The dollar of 1804 went to a New York collector for the enormous sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars.