ledgers, with their covers still fresh, lay like slabs, from which, if
you wiped away the dust, the gilded names of foundered companies would
flash as from gaudy tombstones; letter-books bursting with letters that
no eye would read again so long as the world lasted; yellow title-deeds
from which all the virtue had long since exhaled, and to which no
dangling of enormous seals could any longer lend a convincing air of
importance. Here everything was dead and dusty as an old shoe. The dry
bones in the valley of Askelon were as children skipping in the morning
sun compared with the dusty death that mouldered and mouldered in this
lonely locked-up room,--this catacomb of dead businesses.

It was seldom necessary to visit this room; but occasionally Henry
would find an excuse to loiter an hour there, for there was a certain
dreary romance about the place, and the almost choking smell of old
leather seemed to promise all sorts of buried secrets. It cannot be said
that the place ever adequately gratified the sense of mystery it
excited; but, after all, to excite the sense of mystery is perhaps
better than to gratify it, and, considering its poor material, this room
was quite a clever old mysteriarch.

One day, however, Henry came upon some writing that did greatly interest
him, though it was almost contemporary. It was old Mr. Septimus
Lingard's diary for the year preceding, which he had got hold of,--not
his private diary, but the entirely public official diary in which he
kept account of the division of his days among his various clients--for
the most part an unexciting record. But at the end of the book, on one
of the general memoranda pages, Henry noticed a square block of writing
which, to his surprise, proved to be a long quotation from a book which
the old man had been reading,--on the Immortality of the soul!