further portions of the room lay shrouded in a mystery whose
deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I
now approached with a strange mingling of reverence and
curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to
the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its
fossil remains charred by passion and petrified by tears.
Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personal history was
unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the
world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I was to find
only the records of lands and moneys, how gotten and how secured;
coming down from strange men, and through troublous times, to me,
who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve my
speculations, and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering
around me as if the dead were drawing near, I approached the
secretary; and having found the key that fitted the upper
portion, I opened it with some difficulty, drew near it a heavy
high-backed chair, and sat down before a multitude of little
drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But the door of a little
cupboard in the centre especially attracted my interest, as if
there lay the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key I found.

One of the rusty hinges cracked and broke as I opened the door:
it revealed a number of small pigeon-holes. These, however,
being but shallow compared with the depth of those around the
little cupboard, the outer ones reaching to the back of the desk,
I concluded that there must be some accessible space behind; and
found, indeed, that they were formed in a separate framework,
which admitted of the whole being pulled out in one piece.
Behind, I found a sort of flexible portcullis of small bars of
wood laid close together horizontally. After long search, and