tribe of red men.  He had come to this conclusion for some time, when I and my brother returned from school, hastily summoned back, to find him extremely ill.  He had suffered from a paralytic stroke, and he scarcely recognized us.  But we made out, partly from his broken and wandering words, partly from old Tom (Peter’s father, now dead), that my father’s illness had followed on a violent fit of passion.  He had picked 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.  “I concluded that the letters S M (introduced by my father, of course, as the Indian scroll must