shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries old,
and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its eye
(Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the old
open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it
is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall
kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I
was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in
the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works
up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over
again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment semi-emotional
belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or that fantastic
system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the
ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic-chamber.

The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
sacred to silent memories.

Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but
that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently
told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local
history. I retain my doubts about those "dents" on the floor of the
right-hand room, "the study" of successive occupants, said to have been
made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was
the cause to which the story told me in childhood laid them. That
military consultations were held in that room when the house was General