Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860

ctions of its own, which would form a pleasant theme for description. Some of the results of that visit I embodied, several years ago, in a fiction which I fear the world will ha

th him in my narrative without a grateful recognition of the esteem I have for his memory, in which I share with all who were acquainted with him,--an esteem won by the simple, unostentatious merit of his character, his liberal religious sentiment, and his frank and cordia

of th

tain whether any memorials existed which might furnish further information in regard to the events to which

take the labor. Never did beagle pursue the chase with more steady foot than did this eager and laudable champion of the ancient fame of the State his chosen duty. He rummaged old cuddies, closets, vaults, and cocklofts, and pried into every recess of the Chancery, the Land Office, the Committee-Rooms, and the Council- Chamber, searching up-stairs and down-stairs, wherever a truant paper was supposed to lurk. Groping with lantern in hand and body bent, he made his way through narrow passages, startling the rats from their fastnesses, where they had been intrenched for half a century, and breaking down the thick drapery--the Gobelin tapestry I might call it--woven by successive families of spiders from the days of the last Lord Proprietary. The very dust which was kicked up in Annapolis, as the old newspapers tell us, at the passage of the Sta

o him, when his eye was greeted with the sight of these folios, to see them crumble, like the famed Dead-Sea Apples, into powder, upon every attempt, to handle them. The form of the books was preserved and the character of the writing distinctly legible, but,

ing several years between 1666 and 1692, were irretrievably lost. Others sustain

cords. No research has supplied the means of describing the public events of these intervals, beyond some few inferences, which are only sufficient to show that these silent periods were marked

at of disputes concerning the word of the great Teacher of "peace on earth." Out of these grew any quantity of rebellion and war, tinctured with their usual flavor of persecution. For at this era the wars of Christendom were chiefly waged in support of dogmas and creeds, and took a savage hue from the fury of religious bigotry. The wars of Europe since that period have arisen upon commercial and political quest

l Mr. Ridgely's exploration drew attention to the records, might have been said to have shrunk from all notice of the present generation, and to be fast falling a prey to the tooth of time and the visit of the worm. A few years more of neglect and the ill usage of careless custodians, and it would have passed to that depository of things lost upon the earth, which fable has placed in the moon. It was my good fortune, in this upturning of relics of the past, to lay my hand upon a sadly tattered and decayed MS. volum

place, and, upon inspection, proved to be a Journal of the Council for some fe

as often as they could; and there was such an actual identification of its antiquity in its exterior aspect as well as in its forms of speech, that, when I have sat poring over it alone at midnight in my study, as I have often done, I have turned my eye over my shoulder, expecting to see the apparition of

bot's Cave. The narrative of what it discloses it is now my purpose