Yet he had tried hard to do so in the time that was left him. Knowing his ancestor to have been a sailor, every record bearing on the sailors of the past fifty years was searched by him or those employed by him, but there was no Wargrave who had ever been heard of. The Admiralty officials of those days swore no Wargrave had ever served in the navy; whoever he was, they said, one thing was certain--he was not a King's officer. Then David Crafer got the idea that the man was, after all, a lawyer whom Nicholas confided in; but again he found himself at bay. The records of dead-and-gone lawyers, even when they had been famous, were scanty enough in the early days of last century; when they had not been famous--above all, when they were only attorneys--those records scarcely existed at all. So, at last, David Crafer gave up the law in despair. If there had ever been a Wargrave in that profession, he, at least, could find out nothing about him. Next, he tried the City, which was not a very large place in his own day, and had been smaller in the days of Nicholas. Yet it was difficult to glean any information of the City even in those times--especially since the information desired was nearer sixty than fifty years old. It is true there was, as far back as the period of Nicholas Crafer and the mysterious Wargrave, a London Directory (such useful volume having been first published in 1677), yet in the copies which he could obtain a sight of--which was done with difficulty, since reference books were not preserved with much care in those times, and those which he did see were neither consecutive nor in a perfect condition--he found no mention of the name of Wargrave. So time went on, David Crafer grew old and feeble, and had almost entirely desisted from the search for the name of Wargrave--the man himself must, of course, have been dead for some decades--and had long since come to the conclusion that he would never find out anything about him. Then, all at once, when visiting a friend in the City, and while turning over a volume in that friend's parlour, he lighted on the name and possibly the person. The book was entitled "A Compleat Guide to all Persons who have any Trade of Concern within the City of London and parts adjacent;" and peering into it in a half-interested, half-hopeless, and half-hearted manner, old David saw the name of "Samuel Wargrave, silversmith and dealer, Cornhill." Moreover, he saw that the book containing the name was published in 1701, the year when Nicholas died.