een transmuted by a single
touch, for it retained all the marks that Peter remembered, but in
gold or silver instead of wood, and the initials of his name--which
when a boy he had cut in the wooden door-post--remained as deep in the
pillar of gold. A happy man would have been Peter Goldthwaite except
for a certain ocular deception which, whenever he glanced backward,
caused the house to darken from its glittering magnificence into the
sordid gloom of yesterday.

Up betimes rose Peter, seized an axe, hammer and saw which he had
placed by his bedside, and hied him to the garret. It was but scantily
lighted up as yet by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam which began to
glimmer through the almost opaque bull-eyes of the window. A moralizer
might find abundant themes for his speculative and impracticable
wisdom in a garret. There is the limbo of departed fashions, aged
trifles of a day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of
men, and which passed to the garret when that generation passed to the
grave--not for safekeeping, but to be out of the way. Peter saw piles
of yellow and musty account-books in parchment covers, wherein
creditors long dead and buried had written the names of dead and
buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-grown tombstones
were more legible. He found old moth-eaten garments, all in rags and
tatters, or Peter would have put them on. Here was a naked and rusty
sword--not a sword of service, but a gentleman's small French
rapier--which had never left its scabbard till it lost it. Here were
canes of twenty different sorts, but no gold-headed ones, and
shoebuckles of various pattern and material, but not silver nor set
with precious stones. Here was a large box full of shoes with high
heels and peaked toes. Here, on a shelf, were a multitude of phials
half filled with old apothecary's stuff which, when the other half had
done its business on Peter's ancestors, had been brought hither from
the death-chamber. Here--not to give a longer inventory of articles
that will never be put up at auction--was the fragment of a
full-length looking-glass which by the dust and dimness of its surface
made the picture of these old things look older than the reality. When
Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caught the faint
traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the former Peter
Goldthwaite had come back either to assist or impede his search for
the hidden wealth. And at that mom