“After the storm had died down and it got light enough to see, some of the neighbours were prowling round the place sizing up the damage. Right in the heart of the stump of the elm, which was split wide open--the stump, I mean--they found a funny-looking old copper box buried in what must have been a rot-ted-out place at one time, maybe ninety or a hundred years ago. But the hollow had grown up, and nobody ever had suspected that the tree wasn't solid as iron all the way through, until the lightning came along and just naturally reached a fiery finger down through all that hardwood and probed the old box out of its cache and, without so much as melting a hinge on it, heaved it up into sight, where the first fellow that happened along afterward would be sure to see it. Well, right off they thought of buried treasure, but being honest they called old Van Nicht out of the house, and in his presence they opened her up--the box I mean--and then, lo and behold, they found out that all these years this town had been worshipping a false god! “Yes, sir, the great and only original Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was a rank fake. He was as bogus as a lead nickel. There were papers in the box to prove what nobody, and least of all his own flesh and blood, ever suspected before. He wasn't a hero of the Revolution. He wasn't a colonel under George Washington. He wasn't of Holland-Dutch stock. His name wasn't even Van Nicht. His real name was Jake Nix--that's what it was, Nix--and he was just a plain, everyday Hessian soldier--a mercenary bought up, along with the other Hessians, and sent over here by King George to fight against the cause of liberty, instead of for it. “As near as we can figure it out, he changed his name after the war ended, before he moved here to live, and then after he died--or anyhow when he was an old man--his son, the second Cecilius Jacob, concocted the fairy tale about his father's distinguished services and all the rest of it. The son was the one, it seems, who capitalised the false reputation of the old man. He lived on it, and all the Van Nichts who came after him lived on it too--only they were innocent of practising any deception on the community at large, and the second Van Nicht wasn't. It certainly put the laugh on this town, not to mention the local aristocracy, and the D. A. R.'s and the Colonial Dames and the rest of the blue bloods generally, when the news spread that morning.