all in rags and tatters, or Peter would have put them on.  Here was a naked and rusty sword—­not a sword of service, but a gentleman’s small French rapier—­which had never left its scabbard till it lost it.  Here were canes of twenty different sorts, but no gold-headed ones, and shoebuckles of various pattern and material, but not silver nor set with precious stones.  Here was a large box full of shoes with high heels and peaked toes.  Here, on a shelf, were a multitude of phials half filled with old apothecary’s stuff which, when the other half had done its business on Peter’s ancestors, had been brought hither from the death-chamber.  Here—­not to give a longer inventory of articles that will never be put up at auction—­was the fragment of a full-length looking-glass which by the dust and dimness of its surface made the picture of these old things look older than the reality.  When Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caught the faint traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the former Peter Goldthwaite had come back either to assist or impede his search for the hidden wealth.  And at that moment a strange notion glimmered through his brain that he was the identical Peter who had concealed the gold, and ought to know whereabout it lay.  This, however, he had unaccountably forgotten.

“Well, Mr. Peter!” cried Tabitha, on the garret stairs.  “Have you torn the house down enough to heat the teakettle?”

“Not yet, old Tabby,” answered Peter, “but that’s soon done, as you shall see.”  With the word in his mouth, he uplifted the axe, and laid about him so vigorously that the dust flew, the boards crashed, and in a twinkling the old woman had an apron full of broken rubbish.

“We shall get our winter’s wood cheap,” quoth Tabitha.

The good work being thus commenced, Peter beat down all before him, smiting and hewing at the joints and timbers, unclenching spike-nails, ripping and tearing away boards, with a tremendous racket from morning till night.  He took care, however, to leave the outside shell of the house untouched, so that the neighbors might not suspect what was going on.

Never, in any of his vagaries, though each had made him happy while it lasted, had Peter been happier than now.  Perhaps, after all, there was something in Peter Goldthwaite’s turn of mind which brought him an inward recompense for all the external evil that it caused.  If he were poor, ill-clad, even hungry and exposed, as it were, to be utterly annihilated by a precipice of impending ruin, yet only his body remained in these miserable circumstances, while his aspiring soul enjoyed the sunshine of a bright futurity.  It was his nature to be always young, and the tendency of his mode of life to keep him so.  Gray hairs were nothing—­no, nor wrinkles nor infirmity; he might look old, indeed, and be somewhat disagreeably connected with a gaunt old figure much the worse for wear, but the true, the essential Peter was a young