my venerable predecessor used with senile cunning to hide,
indiscriminately, the coins of the Romans and of the Yankees, rags,
bottles of rhubarb and magnesia, books, papers, and buttons, I had
found, one night, an ancient MS. I had been all the evening reading a
High-German Middle-Age volume, illustrated with wood-cuts, cut as with
a hatchet, and being, as per title-page, _Julius der erste Römische
Kayser, von seinen Kriegen_,--"Julius the first Roman Emperor, of his
Wars."

Buried in the extraordinary adventures of the Kayser, not to be found
in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the
ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that the last
folios were missing.

After a moment of ineffectual vexation, I bethought me of several
repositories in which I had seen portions of _débris_,--leaves, covers,
brazen bosses, and other _membra disjecta_; in one of these I might very
probably find the missing pages.

I fumbled through half a dozen; did not find what I sought, but did
find the aforesaid MS. I was interested at once by the close but clear
penmanship, and by the date, February 29, 1651/2; for this day, by
its numeral, would be in leap-year, according to old style, but not
according to new. How did they settle it? I asked; and what was to
determine for lovelorn maidens, whether they might or might not use the
privilege of the year?

I returned to my desk, and sat down to read; and, as I remember, the
heavy bell of the First Church, close by, just then struck eleven, and I
listened with pleasure to the long, mellow cadence of the reverberations