It was a stone jar, shaped like a ginger-beer bottle, tightly corked, and covered over the mouth and neck by thin sheet-lead, which was paid over with old tarred spunyarn; but it was so thickly encrusted with lichens and dust, which the sun and dew had baked upon it, that it had quite the colour and aspect of the stones that lay around it.
"Now, what the deuce is this?" asked Captain Baylis.
"A bottle," said Hartly, turning it over.
"A bottle in the Post-office!"
"It must have lain here a long time, if we judge by its outside," said I.
"Letters have never been deposited here since 1816," observed Baylis, "when the British built the town and battery yonder."
"So if it has lain here one year, it must have lain fifty."
"Shake it, Hartly," said I.
"It is full of something that rattles!"
"Letters, probably; but few folks can care about them now."