stocks; but the
place, being found heavily mortgaged, was in consequence sold. Gossip
had its day, and left the grass quietly to creep over the captain's
grave, where he still slumbers in a privacy as unmolested as if the
billows of the Indian Ocean, instead of the billows of inland verdure,
rolled over him. Still, I remembered long ago, hearing strange solutions
whispered by the country people for the mystery involving his will, and,
by reflex, himself; and that, too, as well in conscience as purse. But
people who could circulate the report (which they did), that Captain
Julian Dacres had, in his day, been a Borneo pirate, surely were not
worthy of credence in their collateral notions. It is queer what wild
whimsies of rumors will, like toadstools, spring up about any eccentric
stranger, who settling down among a rustic population, keeps quietly to
himself. With some, inoffensiveness would seem a prime cause of offense.
But what chiefly had led me to scout at these rumors, particularly as
referring to concealed treasure, was the circumstance, that the stranger
(the same who razeed the roof and the chimney) into whose hands the
estate had passed on my kinsman's death, was of that sort of character,
that had there been the least ground for those reports, he would
speedily have tested them, by tearing down and rummaging the walls.

Nevertheless, the note of Mr. Scribe, so strangely recalling the memory
of my kinsman, very naturally chimed in with what had been mysterious,
or at least unexplained, about him; vague flashings of ingots united in
my mind with vague gleamings of skulls. But the first cool thought soon
dismissed such chimeras; and, with a calm smile, I turned towards my
wife, who, meantime, had been sitting nearby, impatient enough, I dare
say, to know who could have taken it into his head to write me a letter.

"Well, old man," said she, "who is it from, and what is it about?"

"Read it, wife," said I, handing it.

Read it she did, and then--such an explosion! I will not pretend
to describe her emotions, or repeat her expressions. Enough that my
daughters were quickly called in to share the excitement. Although they
had never dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe's; yet upon the
first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it.
In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney;
alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally
profound maso