 ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants,
never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy
tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant
interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, - and exerting my
fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of
the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew
the way thither, - I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done
up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an
official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and
formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was
something about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the
faded red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would
here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I
found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in
favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of
Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably
in Felt's Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore
years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the
digging up of his remains in the little grave-yard of St. Peter's Church, during
the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of
apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once
adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers
which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr.
Pue's mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the frizzled
wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
    They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at
least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand. I
could account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only
by the fact, that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly; and that these papers,
which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of
his
