can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?  For by the cart-load they are annually burned.  Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—­the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity—­he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.  On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah, Bartleby!  Ah, humanity!

BENITO CERENO.

In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria—­a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili.  There he had touched for water.

On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his mate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the bay.  Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now.  He rose, dressed, and went on deck.

The morning was one peculiar to that coast.  Everything was mute and calm; everything gray.  The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould.  The sky seemed a gray surtout.  Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.  Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations.  Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano’s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.  Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.