settling down on a landscape; a misgiving, coming and going perhaps, a
lack of perfect certainty. Whatever it was, Rose and Septimius had no more
tender and playful words that day; and Rose soon went to look after her
grandmother, and Septimius went and shut himself up in his study, after
making an arrangement to meet Rose the next day.

Septimius shut himself up, and drew forth the document which the young
officer, with that singular smile on his dying face, had bequeathed to him
as the reward of his death. It was in a covering of folded parchment,
right through which, as aforesaid, was a bullet-hole and some stains of
blood. Septimius unrolled the parchment cover, and found inside a
manuscript, closely written in a crabbed hand; so crabbed, indeed, that
Septimius could not at first read a word of it, nor even satisfy himself
in what language it was written. There seemed to be Latin words, and some
interspersed ones in Greek characters, and here and there he could
doubtfully read an English sentence; but, on the whole, it was an
unintelligible mass, conveying somehow an idea that it was the fruit of
vast labor and erudition, emanating from a mind very full of books, and
grinding and pressing down the great accumulation of grapes that it had
gathered from so many vineyards, and squeezing out rich viscid
juices,--potent wine,--with which the reader might get drunk. Some of it,
moreover, seemed, for the further mystification of the officer, to be
written in cipher; a needless precaution, it might seem, when the writer's
natural chirography was so full of puzzle and bewilderment.

Septimius looked at this strange manuscript, and it shook in his hands as
he held it before his eyes, so great was his excitement. Probably,
doubtless, it was in a great measure owing to the way in which it came to
him, with such circumstances of tragedy and mystery; as if--so secret and
so important was it--it could not be within the knowledge of two persons