With it I enclosed all the letters of the Sieur Menanteau which you have taken the trouble to copy. I postponed until to-day the delivery of your communication to our Consistory, inasmuch as the second meeting of that body i» at present in session. I wish that, at last, there might be due reflection, and tliat I might have the satisfaction to communicate to you in my next an agreeable result. In this expectation, I continue beyond all expression.

" Gentlemen, your very humble and very obedient servant,

"J.vcoB Henry Chabanel."

While none of these documents are of any special historical value, they show that the merchants of a century and a half ago were careful men. They used good stout paper, without ruling. Many of them wrote their own commercial letters in a clear and distinct hand. There is no mistaking their signatures. The names of old Peter Goelet, Lewis Pintard and the others are their own, and well calculated to last another hundred years.

The lapse of a hundred and fifty years (one of these letters is dated 1738), though passed in a garret, -- has not obscured a word, nor obliterated a signature. It will be observed, moreover, that fashions revolve in circles of a century or more. The extremely sharp-pointed shoe which came to light with these papers, and from the same hiding-place -- is the very same which has been fashionable in recent years, although from its small size and coarse make, it seems to have^belonged to a female servant of those ancient days. But the inquiry arises; if this was the pattern of shoe worn by the servants ; did not those of the masters and mistresses of -- say 1750-60 "come to the point "still more sharply? The oil found with the shoe may have been intended for " its lubrication," but fate willed it otherwise.