I do n't suppose there is anything of any importance among them . But I 'm not going to carry all that old rubbish to town . So I wish you would look over them and see if there is anything that should be kept . The rest may be burned . '' I felt no particular interest in the task . My Uncle Alan Blair was a mere name to me . He was my mother 's eldest brother and had died years before I was born . I had heard that he had been very clever and that great things had been expected of him . But I anticipated no pleasure from exploring musty old letters and papers of forty neglected years . I went up to Uncle Alan 's room at dusk that night . We had been having a day of warm spring rain , but it had cleared away and the bare maple boughs outside the window were strung with glistening drops . The room looked to the north and was always dim by reason of the close-growing Sweetwater pines . A gap had been cut through them to the northwest , and in it I had a glimpse of the sea Uncle Alan had loved , and above it a wondrous sunset sky fleeced over with little clouds , pale and pink and golden and green , that suddenly reminded me of Miss Sylvia and her fluffy knitting . It was with the thought of her in my mind that I lighted a lamp and began the task of grubbing into Uncle Alan 's trunkful of papers . Most of these were bundles of yellowed letters , of no present interest , from his family and college friends . There were several college theses and essays , and a lot of loose miscellania pertaining to boyish school days . I went through the collection rapidly , until at the bottom of the trunk , I came to a small book bound in dark-green leather . It proved to be a sort of journal , and I began to glance over it with a languid interest . It had been begun in the spring after he had graduated from college . Although suspected only by himself , the disease which was to end his life had already fastened upon him .
The entries were those XXXXX a doomed man , who , feeling the curse fall on him like a frost , blighting all the fair hopes and promises of life , seeks some help and consolation in the outward self-communing of a journal .
above among before by of outside over through to with