Some days afterwards, I bethought me to examine the old musket. It was a
heavy, old-fashioned "queen's arm," with no unusual marks, as I thought;
but upon a silver plate, let into the hollow of the butt, I found,
coarsely and strongly engraved, "JOAB BRYCE, 1765."

Upon mentioning this circumstance to our Recording Secretary, and
wondering how the gun came to be loaded, he told me that the fault was
his. The weapon, he said, had been deposited in the Library by a son of
the old revolutionary soldier; and he added, that this son had informed
him that the old man, who seems to have inherited something of the
peculiar traits of his ancient race, having had this charge in his gun
at the conclusion of the siege of Yorktown, where he was present with
a New England regiment, had managed afterwards to avoid discharging or
drawing it, and had left it by will to his eldest son to be kept loaded
as it was; with the strange clause, that the charge "might sarve out a
Beardsley, if it couldn't a Britisher."

The depositor, the Secretary further told me, had religiously kept the
old gun, and, with a curious, simple strictness of adherence to the
spirit of his father's directions, had oiled the lock, picked the flint,
wired the touch-hole, and put in fresh priming, when he brought the
weapon to the Library.

"I meant to have unloaded it, of course," pursued the excellent
Secretary, "but it passed out of my mind."

A week or two afterwards, I found in one of those obscure columns of
"minion solid," in which the great New York papers embalm the memory of
their current metropolitan crime, the following notice:--