“At the house of a friend where I once passed a night, was one of those stately, upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in prosperous families during the past century [_i.e._ the eighteenth]. It had held the clothes and the books and papers of generation after generation. The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last had been folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,—to reach the upper shelves behind the folding doors,—grown bent after a while,—and followed those who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation. “A boy of twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been opened but by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it, as when the artisan closed it, and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished. “Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you seemed to have suspected? What does it hold? A sin? I hope not.” The “quick-witted boy, with busy eyes and fingers,” was the present owner of the secretary, the Rev. William R. Huntington, D.D., of Grace Church, New York, and since Dr. Holmes wrote of the secretary, new generations have grown up to reach the handles of the drawers and to ransack the old cabinet. [Illustration: Illus. 104.—Block-front Desk, about 1770.] The middle ornament upon the top was gone many years ago, but Dr. Huntington remembers, as a boy with his brother, playing with the two end figures which, it is not astonishing to relate, have not been seen since those years. The figures were carved from wood, of men at work at their trade of cabinet-making, and the boys who were given the carved figures for toys played that the little workmen were the ones who made the secretary. The great handles upon the sides are large and heavy enough for the purpose for which they were intended, to lift the massive piece of furniture. The block-front mahogany desk in Illustration 81 shows the blocked slanting lid. The brasses are original and are unusually large and fine. This desk belongs to Dwight Blaney, Esq., of Boston.