It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles’s third-floor study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending this removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with great care and precision for transportation in the company’s motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimney’s course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait. Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and looked within, finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copybook and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and proclaimed the volume as the ‘Journall and Notes of Jos. Curwen, Gent., of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem’.

Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in Curwen’s handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous because of its inscription: ‘To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & Ye Spheres’.

Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the cipher, whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to: ‘Edw. Hutchinson, Armiger’ and ‘Jedediah Orne, esq.’, ‘or Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Represent’g Them’. The sixth and last was inscribed: ‘Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet’n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: of Whither He Voyag’d, Where He Stay’d, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt.’

[iii]