She sat all the following day over the papers. The memoranda yielded a confusion of dates and moneys spent or collected, a going and coming of funds, lands, expenses. Nothing seemed to have marketable value. No memoranda indicated a note or mortgage held in fee. The farmland had been sold; there were records of sums paid for this tract or that. The musty papers told musty stories, already half-known to her, of acres inherited, of sale bills of watered farmlands and uncut forests lying along the banks of some stream, described with poles and links and the jargon of surveys. In the documents a surveyor walked around a stretch of land, in the sun of warm days, in the wind or the cold or the frost of ill seasons. He walked around tracts with his compass and chain, measuring, writing figures, drawing maps, making descriptions. Five people heired a five-part property, divided equally by the survey, a farm to Joseph, a farm to Eliza, a farm to Jacob, a farm to Anthony T., a farm to Theodosia, the wife of Thomas Singleton.... A will had been opened and read in a parlor, the heirs sitting formally in their seats as became the inheritors of land. Later they drew their chairs together in groups to confer. One sat apart dissatisfied. The truth of the letters met the truth of the surveys and the memoranda. It had been a rainy day. The inheritors had reached the place with difficulty, some of them wet to discomfort. The parlor had been dark and ill dusted, murky with age and memorials. A young woman had brought cedar wood for the fireplace.