arkable effect upon my fancy? And
then the series of accidents and coincidents--these were so _very_
extraordinary. Do you observe how mere an accident it was that these
events should have occurred upon the _sole_ day of all the year in
which it has been, or may be sufficiently cool for foe, and that
without the fire, or without the intervention of the dog at the precise
moment in which he appeared, I should never have become aware of the
death's-head, and so never the possessor of the treasure?"

"But proceed--I am all impatience."

"Well; you have heard, of course, the many stories current--the
thousand vague rumors afloat about money buried, somewhere upon the
Atlantic coast, by Kidd and his associates. These rumors must have had
some foundation in fact. And that the rumors have existed so long and
so continuously, could have resulted, it appeared to me, only from the
circumstance of the buried treasures still _remaining_ entombed. Had
Kidd concealed his plunder for a time, and afterward reclaimed it, the
rumors would scarcely have reached us in their present unvarying form.
You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not
about money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his money, there the
affair would have dropped. It seemed to me that some accident--say the
loss of a memorandum indicating its locality--had deprived him of the
means of recovering it, and that this accident had become known to his
followers, who otherwise might never have heard that the treasure had
been concealed at all, and who, busying themselves in vain, because
unguided, attempts to regain it, had given first birth, and then
universal currency, to the reports which are now so common. Have you
ever heard of any important treasure being unearthed along the coast?"

"Never."

"But that Kidd's accumulations were immense, is well known. I took it
for granted, therefore, that the earth still held them; and you will
scarcely be surprised when I tell you that I felt a hope, nearly
amounting to certainty, that the parchment so strangely found involved
a lost record of the place of deposit."

"But how did you proceed?"

"I held the vellum again to the fire, after increasing the heat, but
nothing appeared. I now thought it possible that the coating of dirt
might have something to do with the failure: so I carefully rinsed the
parchment by pouring warm water over it, and, having done this, I
placed it in a tin pan, wit