that you have gone back as far as the
last days of his predecessor. Thirty or forty years more carry you to
the time when this incumbent began the duties of his office; his hand was
steady then; and the next volume beyond it in date betrays the work of a
still different writer. All this interests me, but I do not see how it
is going to interest my reader. I do not feel very happy about the
Register of Deeds. What can I do with him? Of what use is he going to
be in my record of what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table?
The fact of his being one of the boarders was not so important that I was
obliged to speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my
imagination and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another
guest might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.

I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my hands,
and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible. One always
comes across people in actual life who have no particular business to be
where we find them, and whose right to be at all is somewhat
questionable.

I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out of
the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to be to
me in my record. I have often found, however, that the Disposer of men
and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns and
other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the
ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that
any one fish may be considered a supernumerary. But when Captain Coram's
ship sprung a leak and the carpenter could not stop it, and the
passengers had made up their minds that it was all over with them, all at
once, without any apparent reason, the pumps began gaining on the leak,
and the sinking ship to lift herself out of the abyss which was
swallowing her up. And what do you think it was that saved the ship, and
Captain Coram, and so in due time gave to London that Foundling Hospital
which he endowed, and under the floor of which he lies buried? Why, it
was that very supernumerary fish, which we held of so little account, but
which had wedged itself into the rent of the yawning planks, and served
to keep out the water until the leak was finally stopped.

I am very sure it was Captain Coram, but I almost hope it was somebody
else, in order to give some poor fellow who is lying in wait for the
periodicals