Of course Mr. Jellicorse was not weak enough to make the partner of his bosom the partner of his business; and much as she longed to know why he had put an unusual question to her, she trusted to the future for discovery of that point. She left him, and he with no undue haste--for the business, after all, was not his own--began to follow out his train of thought, in manner much as follows: “This is that old Duncombe's writing--'Dunder-headed Duncombe,' as he used to be called in his lifetime, but 'Long-headed Duncombe' afterward. None but his wife knew whether he was a wise man, or a wiseacre. Perhaps either, according to the treatment he received. Richard Yordas treated him badly; that may have made him wiser. V. b. c. means 'vide box C,' unless I am greatly mistaken. He wrote those letters as plainly and clearly as he could against this power of appointment as recited here. But afterward, with knife and pounce, he scraped them out, as now becomes plain with this magnifying-glass; probably he did so when all these archives, as he used to call them, were rudely ordered over to my predecessor. A nice bit of revenge, if my suspicions are correct; and a pretty confusion will follow it.” The lawyer's suspicions proved too correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when he began to die; skins much older than any man's who handled them, and drier than the brains of any lawyer. “Anno Jacobi tertio, and Quadragesimo Elisabethae! How nice it sounds!” Mr. Jellicorse exclaimed; “they ought all to go in, and be charged for. People to be satisfied with sixty years' title! Why, bless the Lord, I am sixty-eight myself, and could buy and sell the grammar school at eight years old. It is no security, no security at all. What did the learned Bacupiston say--'If a rogue only lives to be a hundred and eleven, he may have been for ninety years disseized, and nobody alive to know it!'” Older and older grew the documents as the lawyer's hand travelled downward; any flaw or failure must have been healed by lapse of time long and long ago; dust and grime and mildew thickened, ink became paler, and contractions more contorted; it was rather an antiquary's business now than a lawyer's to decipher them. “What a fool I am!” the solicitor thought. “My cuffs will never wash white again, and all I have found is a mare's-nest. However, I'll go to the bottom now. There may be a gold seal--they used to put them in with the deeds three hundred years ago. A charter of Edward the Fourth, I declare! Ah, the Yordases were Yorkists--halloa! what is here? By the Touchstone of Shepherd, I was right after all! Well done, Long-headed Duncombe!”