with.  This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason.  At one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon another, containing bundles of official documents.  Large quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor.  It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes.  But then, what reams of other manuscripts—­filled, not with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—­had gone equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—­saddest of all—­without purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen.  Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history.  Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants—­old King Derby—­old Billy Gray—­old Simon Forrester—­and many another magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.  The founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as long-established rank,

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the king’s officials accompanied the British army in its flight from Boston.  It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some little interest.  Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants never heard of now on ’Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity—­and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise