The leaves were scribbled over with the name of John,—­“John,” in a cramped, childish hand.  His father’s book, no doubt, and the writing a bit of boyish mischief.  Outside now, in the street, the boys were pelting each other with snowballs, just as this John had done in the clay-paths.  But for nearly two hundred years his bones had been crumbled into lime and his flesh gone back into grass and roots.  Yet here he was, a boy still; here was the old pamphlet and the scrawl in yellowing ink, with the smell about it still.

Printed by Rainier Janssen, 1698.  I turned over the leaves, expecting to find a sermon preached before Andros, “for the conversion of Sadducees,” or some “Report of the Condition of the Principalities of New Netherland, or New Sweden, for the Use of the Lord’s High Proprietors thereof” (for of such precious dead dust this library is full); but I found, instead, wrapped in weighty sentences and backed by the gravest and most ponderous testimony, the story of a baby, “a Sucking Child six Months old.”  It was like a live seed in the hand of a mummy.  The story of a baby and a boy and an aged man, in “the devouring Waves of the Sea; and also among the cruel devouring Jaws of inhuman Canibals.”  There were, it is true, other divers persons in the company, by one of whom the book is written.  But the divers persons seemed to me to be only part of that endless caravan of ghosts that has been crossing the world since the beginning; they never can be anything but ghosts to us.  If only to find a human interest in them, one would rather they had been devoured by inhuman cannibals than not.  But a baby and a boy and an aged man!

All that afternoon, through the dingy windows of the old building, I could see the snow falling soft and steadily, covering the countless roofs of the city, and fancying the multitude of comfortable happy homes which these white roofs hid, and the sweet-tempered, gracious women there, with their children close about their knees.  I thought I would like to bring this little live baby back to the others, with its strange, pathetic story, out of the buried years where it has been hidden with dead people so long, and give it a place and home among us all again.

I only premise that I have left the facts of the history unaltered, even in the names; and that I believe them to be, in every particular, true.

On the 22d of August, 1696, this baby, a puny, fretful boy, was carried down the street of Port Royal, Jamaica, and on board the “barkentine” Reformation, bound for Pennsylvania; a Province which, as you remember, Du Chastellux, a hundred years later, described as a most savage country which he was compelled to cross on his way to the burgh of Philadelphia, on its border.  To this savage country our baby was bound.  He had by way of body-guard his mother, a gentle Quaker lady; his father, Jonathan Dickenson, a wealthy planter, on his way to increase his wealth in Penn’s