I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return ofconsciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peachcolour, dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approachof the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began againto assume crystalline forms, the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew tomy wondering consciousness. The day before had been my one-and-twentieth birthday. Amongother ceremonies investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in which my fatherhad kept his private papers, had been delivered up to me. As soon as I was left alone, I orderedlights in the chamber where the secretary stood, the first lights that had been there for many a year;for, since my father's death, the room had been left undisturbed. But, as if the darkness had beentoo long an inmate to be easily expelled, and had dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, ithad clung, these tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to throw yetdarker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice. All the further portions of the roomlay shrouded in a mystery whose deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which Inow approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I wasabout to turn up to the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remainscharred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personalhistory was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the world, and how theworld had left him. Perhaps I was to find only the records of lands and moneys, how gotten andhow secured; coming down from strange men, and through troublous times, to me, who knew littleor nothing of them all. To solve my speculations, and to dispel the awe which was fast gatheringaround me as if the dead were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and having found the keythat fitted the upper portion, I opened it with some difficulty, drew near it a heavy high-backedchair, and sat down before a multitude of little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But the door ofa little cupboard in the centre especially attracted my interest, as if there lay the secret of this longhidden world. Its key I found.