The past is a tomb. There let events, as well as men, sleep in peace. Fate befal him who disturbs them; and indeed were there not even a sort of profanation in raking up things done as well as in troubling the ashes of the dead, what does man obtain by breaking into the grave of the past? Nothing but dry bones, denuded of all that made the living act interesting. History is but a great museum of osteology, where the skeletons of great deeds are preserved without the muscles--here a tall fact and there a short one; some sadly dismembered, and all crumbling with age, and covered with dust and cobwebs. Take up a skull, chapfallen as Yorick's. See how it grins at you with its lank jaws and gumless teeth. See how the vacant sockets of the eyes glare meaningless, and the brow, where high intelligence sat throned, commanding veneration, looks little wiser than a dried pumpkin. And thus--even thus, as insignificant of the living deeds that have been, are the dry bones of history, needing the inductive imagination of a Cuvier to clothe them again with the forms that once they wore. No, no, I will have nothing to do with antecedents. They were past before the Tale began, and let them rest. Nevertheless, it is always well worth while, in order to avoid any long journeys back, to keep every part of the story going at once, and manfully to resist both our own inclination and the reader's, to follow any particular character, or class of characters, or series of events. Rather let us, going from scene to scene, and person to person, as often as it may be necessary, bring them up from the rear. It is likewise well worth while to pursue the career of such new character that may be introduced, till those who are newly made acquainted with him, have discovered a sufficient portion of his peculiarities. I shall therefore beg leave to follow Mr. Wittingham on his way homeward; but first I will ask the reader to remark him as he pauses for a moment at the inn-door, with worthy Mr. Groomber a step behind. See how the excellent magistrate rubs the little vacant spot between the ear and the wig with the fore-finger of the right-hand, as if he were a man amazingly puzzled, and then turns his head over his shoulder to inquire of the landlord if he knows who the two guests are, without obtaining any further information than that one of them had been for some weeks in the house--which Mr. Wittingham well knew before, he having the organ of Observation strongly developed--and that the other had just arrived; a fact which was also within the worthy magistrate's previous cognizance.