The one important thing that I wished to prove was, that Thomas Blake was the brother of Nancy Blake, and that Cecilia Crabshaw was thus great-grand niece of said Nancy.  The court pronounced itself satisfied as to this, and Miss Crabshaw was declared the nearest of kin, and hence heir to the property.

The case had required the presence of my fair client, so she had made the journey to Washington a week previous, where she visited an uncle, and came out to D——­ county to be present at the hearing.

It was necessary for me to remain in Virginia some little time on account of other business, and it was arranged that I should see what could be done towards effecting a sale of the real estate.  Accordingly, soon after the case had been decided, I went out to look over the premises.

The house was very old, and showed no signs of any improvement having been made for at least half a century.  The furniture was of little value and there were but few other things.  A rusty sword, a few old books, and some odd trinkets comprised about all.  As Miss Crabshaw did not care for these they were given to a negro woman who had rendered some assistance to Old Nancy in the last years of her life.

The house itself contained none of those mysterious passages or hidden closets which the imagination so readily connects with such old habitations.  There was a kind of small locker, however, opening from a large closet near the ceiling.  This little recess contained nothing but a package of old papers and worthless letters, faded and mouldy.  On looking them over, one in particular attracted my attention on account of an official seal which it bore.  It proved to be a document commissioning Richard Anthony Treadwell as Major in the Seventh Regiment of Cavalry in the Royal Army of his Majesty King George III.  The date was June 12, 1793.  But who was Richard Anthony Treadwell, and how happened his commission to be here?  A discovery made a few minutes later served to throw some light on the mystery.  Among the few books found in the house was an antique volume of Shakspere’s plays, which, judging from the thick net-work of cobwebs encircling it, had not been touched for years.

Curiosity led me to open the book.  On its fly-leaf was the inscription:  “A present to Thomas from his father, Richard A. Treadwell.”  A curious fact was that this name had been crossed and recrossed with a pen, and underneath had been written as a substitute in the same handwriting:  “John Blake.”  The ink used at the first writing had retained its blackness in a remarkable degree; while that used at the time of the erasure and for the substitute name had so faded that the first name was much plainer than the second.  The natural inference, then, was that the father of Nancy Blake and the great-great-grandfather of Cecilia Crabshaw had, at some time, changed his name from that of Richard Anthony Treadwell to that of John Blake.  Why he should have done so was an unexplained problem, and whether it was my duty to inform Miss Crabshaw of the fact or not was not quite evident to me.  What I really did, however, was to put the old document in my pocket and forget it.