surveys--but of my late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres, long a
ship-master and merchant in the Indian trade, who, about thirty
years ago, and at the ripe age of ninety, died a bachelor, and in
this very house, which he had built. He was supposed to have
retired into this country with a large fortune. But to the
general surprise, after being at great cost in building himself
this mansion, he settled down into a sedate, reserved and
inexpensive old age, which by the neighbors was thought all the
better for his heirs: but lo! upon opening the will, his property
was found to consist but of the house and grounds, and some ten
thousand dollars in stocks; but the place, being found heavily
mortgaged, was in consequence sold. Gossip had its day, and left
the grass quietly to creep over the captain's grave, where he
still slumbers in a privacy as unmolested as if the billows of
the Indian Ocean, instead of the billows of inland verdure,
rolled over him. Still, I remembered long ago, hearing strange
solutions whispered by the country people for the mystery
involving his will, and, by reflex, himself; and that, too, as
well in conscience as purse. But people who could circulate the
report (which they did), that Captain Julian Dacres had, in his
day, been a Borneo pirate, surely were not worthy of credence in
their collateral notions. It is queer what wild whimsies of
rumors will, like toadstools, spring up about any eccentric
stranger, who settling down among a rustic population, keeps
quietly to himself. With some, inoffensiveness would seem a prime
cause of offense. But what chiefly had led me to scout at these
rumors, particularly as referring to concealed treasure, was the
circumstance, that the stranger (the same who razeed the roof and
the chimney) into whose hands the estate had passed on my
kinsman's death, was of that sort of character, that had there