gal documents,
letters with their edges worn into tatters and addressed in the
crabbed writing of a century ago, title deeds discolored and yellow
with age, most of them fastened with great red seals, a mass of musty
records that looked dry and dull indeed.

While he was spreading them out upon the table, the door opened
quietly and Janet slipped in. She assured them that she had dined and
had not got wet, that, except for Mrs. Brown's terrible fever of
anxiety lest Cousin Jasper should not be properly cared for, all had
gone well. Might she listen, please, and was there going to be another
story?

"Not of just the same kind that I have been telling you up yonder on
the Windy Hill," replied Tom Brighton, "although here you see the
source of all those tales and of a hundred others like them. They are
all buried here in these dusty papers, the history of your forbears
and of the lands in Medford Valley. It goes all the way back, does the
record, to the time when our several times great-grandfather bought
the first tract from the Indian, Nashola. I am always glad to think
that the red man had enough intelligence and the white man enough
honor to make something like a real bargain, that this valley was
purchased for what the wild lands were worth instead of being paid for
with a gun, a drink of bad spirits, and a handful of beads. See, here
is Nashola's name; he learned to write after a fashion, although the
Indian witnesses signed only with a mark. And here is the signature of
that first one of our kin to settle in the New World, Matthew
Hallowell."

"Hallowell?" echoed Oliver. "Did he belong to those same Hallowells in
the story, who quarreled over the _Huntress_?"

"Yes," was the answer, "he was the beginning of a vigorous line,
living in and near Medford Valley until there came at last the
Hallowell who moved to the seaport town, who built his first ship
there and launched into foreign trade. They became great merchants,
the Hallowells, in that time between the Revolution and the War of
1812 when Yankee ships and Yankee owners were lords of the high seas.
But fortune failed after the death of Reuben Hallowell; his son Alan
loved sailing rather than trading and his daughter Cicely married a
junior partner in a lesser firm, Howard Brighton, who thought it
better for his sons and daughter to go to live on the lands in Medford
Valley that had belonged to their mother and had been given by her to
him. Cicely's children