Elias's first notable find was a pretty little gold lead-pencil, one, he recognized, that had been sent him, as a present, on his twenty-first birthday, by an aunt of his--his father's only sister--who lived in New Orleans, and whom he had never seen. It had got lost, in a most inexplicable manner, very-soon after its reception; and, conscience-smitten, Elias now recollected how he had suspected, to the degree of moral certainty, a poor devil of an Italian model of having stolen it. Well, here it was, intact; and so, poor Archimede had been innocent, after all. Holding it in his hand, and examining it a little, before putting it into his pocket, and going on with his work, Elias felt himself suddenly carried backward, for an instant, to the period with which it was associated. Talismanic pencil, that had power to raise the dead, and annihilate the intervening years! There it lay, in shape, weight, color, in length, breadth, thickness, in all its attributes and dimensions, precisely the same as on that far-off birthday morning, when his mother, to whose care his aunt had entrusted it, delivered it to him, neatly boxed up in pasteboard, wrapped in tissue-paper, and sealed with red sealing-wax. How well he remembered! It might have been last week. It might almost have been yesterday. And yet, how much, indeed how much, had happened since. At the breakfast-table, she had said, “Here, Elias, here is something your Aunt Rachel has sent you--something that you will prize especially, because she is not at all rich, and has doubtless had to pinch and deny herself, in order to buy it.” Then she offered him the parcel, which he, touched, surprised, expectant, took and opened, finding within this same little pencil; and not it only, but wound around it, a bit of writing in his Aunt Rachel's hand--the traditional Hebrew _bensch_: “May the Lord make you to be great, like Ephraim and Manasseh!” And immediately, of course, in his boyish enthusiasm, he had set himself down, and put the pencil to its virgin use, by inditing with it a glowing note of thanks--about the only use he ever had put it to, for very soon afterward it disappeared. And then, the rest, the rest of that wonderful, never-to-be-forgotten day! The pride and the triumph of it! The masterpiece of a dinner that his mother had prepared. The check for a dazzling sum of money, that he had found adroitly folded in with his napkin! The toothsome nut-cake, with its twenty-one symbolic candles! The wine that had been drunken to his health! The speech that the rabbi had made, standing up at the head of the table, and haranguing away as though he had had an audience of a thousand, instead of only Elias and his mother--the mother, however, listening amid tears and smiles, and applauding and nodding her head, as the splendid achievements which the future was to behold at the hands of her son, were prophetically described. The watch the rabbi had given him!--the