d up, it seems, from some
Indians a scroll which he considered of the utmost value, and which he
placed in a shelf of the library. Now, old Gumbo was a house-servant at
that time, and, dumb as he was, and stupid as he was, my father had
treated him with peculiar kindness. Unluckily Gumbo yielded to the
favourite illusion of all servants, white and black, male and female,
that anything they find in the library may be used to light a fire with.
One chilly day Gumbo lighted the fire with the newly purchased Indian
birch scroll. My father, when he heard of this performance, lost all
self-command. In his ordinary temper the most humane of men, he simply
raged at Gumbo. He would teach him, he said, to destroy his papers. And
it appeared, from what we could piece together (for old Tom was very
reticent and my father very incoherent), that he actually branded or
tattooed a copy of what Gumbo had burnt on the nigger's body!"

"But," I interrupted, "your father knew all the scroll had to tell him,
else he could not have copied it on Gumbo. So why was he in such a
rage?"

"You," said Moore, with some indignation, "are not a collector, and you
can't understand a collector's feelings. My father knew the contents of
the scroll, but what of that? The scroll was the first edition, the real
original, and Gumbo had destroyed it. Job would have lost his temper if
Job had been a collector. Let me go on. My brother and I both
conjectured that the scroll had some connection with the famous riches of
the Sun and the secret of the Pyramid of Teohuacan. Probably, we
thought, it had contained a chart (now transferred to Gumbo's frame) of
the hiding-place of the treasure. However, in the confusion caused by my
father's illness, death, and burial, Gumbo escaped, and, being an
unusually stupid nigger, he escaped due south-west. Here he seems to
have fallen into the hands of some slave-holding Indians, who used him
even worse than any white owners would have done, and left him the mere
fragment you saw. He filtered back here through the exchange of
commerce, 'the higgling of the market,' and as soon as I recognized him
at the sale I made up my mind to purchase him. So did my brother; but,
thanks to Peter and his hornets, I became Gumbo's owner. On examining
him, after he was well washed on the night of the attack, I found this
chart, as you may call it, branded on Gumbo's back." Here Moore made a
rapid tracing on a sheet of paper