are wholly unable to account. Perhaps we ought to add that the old gentleman, who was dressed in a coat of rusty black, a pair of olive velvet breeches, and a three cornered beaver, had a certain briskness in his appearance, that seemed almost incompatible with the gloomy sternness of an apparition: added to which we had an internal conviction the moment we saw him, that somewhere, at sometime, certainly we had seen the same individual before, or else had heard his appearance so vividly described by others, that it had long settled in memory like that of an old acquaintance.
"My son," said the sage looking old gentleman, revealing as he raised his little cocked hat from his head a few gray hairs, plaited and clubbed behind, "what my son can have tempted thee, with rash and presumptuous hand, to essay retrieving this ancient city from the degeneracy into which it has been gradually lapsing, ever since it passed from under the rule of its ancient Dutch dynasty? The dapper little town of those days has bloated into a big metropolis, and the change like that of a bustling tapster into a burly landlord hath been marvelously for the worse. We have lost in serviceableness what we have gained in importance, and to my mind things have come to such a pass that the town, like an overgrown younker as it is, having become too big for its jerkin, it well becometh some one to look after it occasionally and see, at least, that though irreclaimable in itself, it doth not expose its extravagances too much to the neighbors. But what, young sir, can have tempted thee to assume an office for which thou art not in any way qualified, seeing that since I myself cannot in my fleshly form undertake the office of beadle, there lacketh some of those arch wags and right merry spirits who used, in Salmagundi, to cudgel the town so good humoredly into better ways? And why hast thou presumed, without the permission of my rightful and only heir, to assume a name—(and here the person of the little gentleman dilated into ten-fold dignity, while he replaced his rusty beaver on his head, and cocked it over the right eye after a most impressive fashion)—a name, young mortal, which, as that of a lofty and veritable annalist, is now embalmed with those of Thucydides and Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus and Polybius, Diodorus, and Aboul Hassan Aly the son of Alkhan, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Sanchoniathon, Manetho, and Berosus!"
Though we had surmised before in whose presence we were, and felt the divinity of that presence—though every incident
