re
severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living
person, perhaps to the future occupant of some professor's chair or
metropolitan pulpit.

It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite
alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight
thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I
would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by
this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was
said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the
world. There were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church
and State, which their perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before
their fellows, but which, in the bitterness of remorse, they had
recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to future
times,--thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was
vague talk, also, of funds which had been deposited to found some
professorship in the College, to furnish some instruction which the age
was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too, there were intimations of
endowments to establish scholarships for women, who,--so it was
argued,--after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of years,
would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In
short, there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the
blood, as this tough old ark, buffeting slowly through the years,
entered its familiar night. If there was deficiency in the testimony
which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there was, doubtless,
sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.

During the latter part of a certain August--my family being established
at the seaside--I determined to devote a long day to the College
Library. The fact was, that a trifling domestic incident--no other than
the smoking of a kitchen-chimney--had turned my attention to the
conditions of atmospheric changes. Certain phenomena I had observed
seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in popular text-books. Indeed,
as it appeared to me, modifications of a received theory--which might be
determined by a diligent comparison of existing authorities--would
suggest a household economy of great practica