A crank note comes to Sam saying the cake is poisoned.
Snap it up if you can find it, then wait 10 years for it to shed its austerity and to let the tobacco and lead pencil notes come to the fore.
This department of the notes comes to be fun.
And the average bill, it should be noted, comes to about $75 a head.
The lack of high notes came to feel like a form of self-abnegation, like Nureyev dancing a waltz.
The relics subsequently vanished, but when the doctor's notes came to light, in the nineteen-nineties, they were reviewed by forensic anthropologists.
There are literary heroes, too, among them Sir Edward Gibbon, whose "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Mr. Caro notes, comes to six volumes.
The F.B.I., drawn into the case because of the two mysterious notes, came to believe that Mr. McCormick, 41, was murdered and that the encrypted notes might lead to the killer.
The couple lived upstairs, an arrangement which, Beth notes, came to an end one morning when Tom "came in to show me how fresh this big piece of fish was while I was in the shower.
Amidst the harsh utterances and rude claxons of our own time, these sweet, melancholic notes, coming to us from the Romantic era, have not lost their power to enchant.
