LITTERATEUR AND BOOK-HUNTER
that in the earlier edition of 1646 this statement did not appear, thus proving that somebody had inserted it later. In the controversy one of the authorities relied upon was Gerhard Roosen, a noted preacher who died in 1711 at Hamburg, aged a hundred years, and whose grandmother had known Menno personally. One day I received a letter from a man out in Ohio saying he had an old Menno Simons book which he would sell to me for two dollars. Though this was the only description and nothing could be told about condition and little about substance, it was not much to risk and I wrote to him to send it to me by express. When it arrived, behold, it was a copy of the 1646 edition of the works of Menno which had belonged to Gerhard Roosen. In it Roosen had made a number of notes in manuscript and among others one which told of a visit he had made in 1649 with Peter Jans Moyer and Tobias Govertz van den Wijngaert to the grave of Menno, that he was born in 1492 and died in 1559 and was buried in his own cabbage garden. I sent the information, thus remarkably and accidently discovered, to Dr. Scheffer, of Amsterdam, who embodied it in an article printed in the Doopsgezinde Bijdragen, and in this way in America was settled an uncertain question of the remote past in Europe which their libraries and scholars could not determine.
In the shop of David McKay, on Ninth Street above Walnut, lay a pile of religious and, therefore, seemingly pecuniarily valueless books which had just come in from the country. But among them I found a fine copy of Truth Exalted, the first book printed by William Bradford in New York, which, in the judgment of experts, had displaced the Laws, before regarded as the first, and the latter had brought at auction $1,600. McKay sold it to me with two or three other books for a dollar.
In the auction room of Davis and Harvey in a corner lay a heap of books which had the appearance of rubbish.
