"Ja! Ja!" cried Dr. Krätpfuhl; "and, as for the gold, there is Captain Kyd's near by, if any credit may be given to a hundred legends local to the soil.'

66 Did you know that this place of mine was so highly honored?" said George, turning quickly to me with something like his old-time

energy.

"What? with Kyd's treasure? You esteem it an honor then to share what belongs to every glen on this river, and every sand-bar on the coast from Passamaquoddy Bay to San Augustine?"

"Ah, you are a skeptic, I perceive," said George; "I am not. If I could only put myself in Kyd's place for a moment, and confine my own count of the probabilities within his purview!"

Dr. Krätpfuhl lifted his fat hands to his hat-crown again with a ludicrous hopeless gesture. "My tear sir," he said, with earnest energy of entreaty," stick with the blough! stick with the blough! Kyd's treasure is not hid so deep but that the blough-point will lay him bare to the roots."

"The plough, or the spade!" muttered George. "Nein!" screamed the Doctor, with furious protest; "the spade makes too full the head, too confused the ideas, too aching the spine. It will not do that spade! It must the plough always be, or I will not warrant the delicate tissues, mein friend. No, no!" And he tapped his forehead with his fat forefinger, and sucked angrily at his pipe.

We stood for a few minutes by the placid cove into which the little brook debouched, watching the opaline changes of the river and sky as the sun went down in splendor, and then we returned to the house.

The next morning, as I was early walking in the gravelled paths of the lawn, examining the exquisite flowers and rare shrubs, Dr. Krätpfuhl came out to me with an atrociously ugly smoking-cap on his head instead of hat, and his gigantic pipe at his mouth in full blast.

Mr.

"Morning! ah!" he cried, "you are smelling of my favorite, my queen of the Noisettes, my altogether lovely Aimée Vibert! sweet rose of affections poof! thou contemptible robber! my Graves, it is a proof that tobacco was intended for man's use that no pestilent insects can endure it," said he, plucking a leaf on which a small green caterpillar was feeding, and watching the insect squirm and contort itself in the clouds of tobacco-smoke which he pitilessly poured upon it. Then crushing the worm between his thumb and finger he tossed the leaf away, and, thrusting his arm within mine, pushed me off down the lawn towards the river.

"Our friend is so much of his rest deprived, that when he does sleep late in the morning, it is proper that he should lie late. Ah! Meester Graves, our friend is in a precarious state. We must occupy the mind with something, or it is all wrong. I tell you, Meester Graves, the trouble is the brain."

"Do you mean to say that Brooker's mind is affected, or going to be affected?" I asked, in great alarm.

"I mean that he is all wrong,,your friend! He is American, every inch, and burns at both ends the simultaneous candle, like a he

will pardon me - like a fool! So then! He has himself all-topieces broken down, or up- how you call it? The stomach, the liver, the heart, the brain, all a-crank! So then! The city doctors patch him cobbler beasts, for rough work!-and send him to the country and to me. I can make his body with the plough, and fresh air, and horseback galloping, well again and sound and strong- if the sick brain, that is, will give me time, and will not poison the mind, and set the body all agee thereby. So then, you see? But, my dear Meester Graves, the brain is very sick; I am afraid there will be a soft spot to it, or an inflamed spot, or that it will not wait for the stomach and heart to fortify themselves so strong as they will presently be able to send succors to it also. I cannot put that delicate brain to the plough's tail, nor to gallop against the fresh air. And I moost find some work for that delicate brain to do that brain so verflucht Americanly overworked or it will spin itself into madness with frantic fury, like the dog that makes himself head-giddy with revolving in pursuit of his own tail. So then, it is a predicament! You understand that it is a serious one. Help me, then, to pull our friend out of it. You well know by old experience his idiosyncrasis · his habit of thought and life. Come to his rescue then, in the sacred name of ancient friendship! Ach! my pipe's out."

I told the Doctor that in such cases friendship was mere impotency in the presence of technical skill such as I felt sure he possessed; that I would gladly aid him and George's noble wife in any way they might suggest, but could originate no plan of my own.

A plan I have excogitated, Meester Graves," answered he, thoughtfully, "but it is frightfully perilous, and I do not like to make my voyages in balloons while I have legs to plod the earth," eyeing his stumpy pedestals with all a magpie's complacency. "Our noble friend has got the money-stain upon his fingers so ineradicably deep that it has eaten into flesh and bone. nay, into heart and brain! It is the American paradox personified, Meester Graves, this friend of ours! He is liberal as water, generous as the lordly lion, kind and gentle as the bleating young - how you call it?- mutton; yet withal hungry as the vulture, rapacious as the gliding cold-eyed shark, for money, money, money! The American disease, morbus Americanus, rendering him—if I might stoop to perpetrate a wretched calembour -a money-maniac. Ah, this auri flagitiosa fames! It imperils the soul of your generous people, Meester Graves. It makes me to comprehend the anomalous Seneca of antiquity, who preached the Stoical philosophy and stole and scratched together seven millions of money!"

"Try your plan, Doctor," said I; "anything will be better than the dreadful disease you anticipate."

"I will wait," said the Doctor; and he trundled me along the dewy grass to show me a favorite flower or a rare shrub, until my feet were wet, my legs tired, and the summons came to call us to breakfast.

I made only a short visit to "Undercliff," but was not permitted to depart until I had promised to return very soon to make a longer stay. George told me I was better to him than the plough; Mrs. Brooker assured me his spirits had brightened up wonderfully since I

came, and the impressive Krätpfuhl, laying his fat, grub-like fingers in my hand, vowed I was a born doctor, and should be his partner when he returned to practice, as I was indubitably his life-tightcemented bosom-friend.

About a month after my return to the city I received a letter from Brooker, which struck me curiously. He wrote under date of July 3d:

"My Dear Graves:- I send you by express to-day a small package of antiquated coins, comprising pistoles and moidores, sequins and louis d'ors, mohurs and sicca rupees, florins, pieces of eight, old crown-pieces, crusadoes and testoons all the coinage, in short, of that veracious chronicle called Robinson Crusoe, which we have been vilely taught to look upon as a myth and a fable. You will of course demand to know whence they came, and you will of course charge me with trying to quiz you when I inform you that they are part of the redoubtable Captain Kyd's treasure. But if not, how did they come where I found them? For they are specimens of coin which I have been ploughing up every day since you left here, out of the rich soil of my meadow where it borders the brook, and upon the lawn side also of the stream. The next day after your departure I took my spade and was going to dig about the roots of a singular rock which juts out of the ravine half-way up the cliff, and has certainly been rudely marked by the hand of man I confess to you I have been long thinking about Kyd's treasure, grieved that such wealth should lie buried and useless in the soil; but the Doctor, who is sometimes abominably pig-headed, protested so very vehemently that I was constrained to yield to his entreaties and return to the plough. This time I laid off a 'land,' as we ploughmen call it, next the brook and towards the river, and I had scarcely driven my team half the length of the first furrow when there rolled out over the inverted turf a fair half-dozen of these bright fellows that I send you. I've seen potatoes tumble out so when the plough has split the hill. You may imagine how eagerly I seized and examined this singular new crop. Well, to make a long story short, I have ploughed ever since as faithfully as John Wilde could have done, and the net product has been not far from two thousand dollars in coins of every sort. I have reasoned about this matter very anxiously, and I believe I have been able to put myself in Kyd's place. He was a diabolically shrewd villain, was Kyd, and knew that all the world would be hunting for his treasure. So instead of burying it in one spot, as an ordinary man would do, he sowed it abroad, probably roughly raking the ground afterwards, and trusting to time, and the known gravity of gold and silver, and the continual silt downwards of soil from the hills, to perfect its covering and its security. When I say sowed, I do not mean in a mere broadcast, hap-hazard way. I have made a map of my ploughing on which I have located every piece of coin as it was discovered, and I am persuaded it was drilled in, in shallow spade-dug trenches, in the shape of a great quincunx extending over the entire meadow and intervale of Undercliff.' The greater part of the treasure has of course sunk below the point of my small plough, but as soon as I have established the precise locality and direction of

the quincunxial lines, I shall procure a heavy four-horse team and a Michigan double-plough, which I suspect will go abundantly deep. My health is vastly improved, and I sleep better and eat heartier than I have done for years. Keep the coin I send you for your little cabinet of curiosities. Mrs. Brooker sends her love, and Krätpfuhl, whose occupation is nearly gone, and who consequently watches me as a hen watches the last chick that the fortunes of the poultryyard have left her, desires to be fraternally remembered by you, the man after his own soul. Come soon to see us, and believe me your friend, GEORGE BROOKER."

The parcel of coins reached me next day, and had every appearance of genuineness and antiquity. In the presence of this palpable result of George's success at ploughing, I could not, of course, suspect him of a hallucination, but I was seriously afraid that he would meet with some disappointment in the matter of this new fervid pursuit of his that might work him injury. When I wrote to thank him for his valuable present, I took care to warn him against imitating John Wilde too closely, and surrendering himself to work which, if he overdid it, would prove as injurious to him as his intercourse with 'Change had been. Soon I received his answer.

"Thanks, dear John," he wrote, "for your affectionate solicitude on my behalf, but I am glad to inform you that there is no need to give yourself any concern. I have grown brown as a berry with toiling in the July sun; my hands are hard, my muscles knit like wire that is woven, and my consumption of bacon and cabbage, corn-bread and buttermilk has reached an alarming height. Besides, I feel a strange sense of protectedness and safety in the consciousness of a new guardianship and tutelage, of which I do not rightly know how to speak to you. The knight of old who was secure in his lady's favor could fight more bravely clad only in her sark, than other knights who were panoplied in armor of proof. Don't you think Arthur wielded his Excalibur with a perpetual sense that it was a more than mortal weapon? Cannot you fancy that Achilles charged behind his shield the more bravely because he knew it had been plated in Olympian forges? There you have me, then! I do not believe the mountain would come to me, were I to bid it; but I have a faith of my own that makes it a perfectly natural thing for me to go to the mountain. The Doctor's little people, his Nisse and trolls and dwarfs, black, white, and brown, I do not believe in, any more than John Graves does; but, nevertheless, my dear friend, the treasure which my plough is daily turning up is not any buried plunder of pirates and thieves. This I can prove; but whether I can explain it is another matter. In the first place, the gold and silver of the exhumed coin is absolutely pure gold and silver, totally free from alloy of any kind; and this, you know, could not be the case with any coinage the product of human mints. The repeated analyses which Dr. Krätpfuhl has made of it under my scrutiny satisfy me upon this point. second place, these coins, if buried by any human agency, are buried by an agency which is still operative; i. e., the furrows that I have ploughed yesterday, and taken the gold from, when I plough them.

In the

over again to-day, yield the coin again, just as before! Thirdly, I find that it is the ploughing, not the soil, which is the productive element, and that I get as large a yield from a short furrow as from a long one. I am now engaged in perfecting a piece of machinery by means of which I shall be able to turn the greatest number of furrows in the shortest possible space of time. We of this age of inventions and machinery are not constrained to wear our muscles out in the daily tiresome round that destroyed John Wilde. We have arms of steel and stomachs of rivetted iron, and tireless feet of whirling wheels to do our work for us. Pray keep my secret, for I see in this thing the possibility of boundless wealth, and I shall not want everybody to know how I was able to enrich my friends and myself. The average world might not appreciate us, and it would not be pleasant for us to be captured under writs of de lunatico just as we were reaping the utmost products of our sanity, would it? Elizabeth sends her love-she is rather low-spirited- I do not know on what account. The Doctor has gone across the river to visit one of his friends, who is proprietor of a famous maison de santé over there. If that eccentric is not more careful, his friend will be sure to lock him up and put him under treatment, for he is astonishingly wild here lately. Sincerely yours, "GEORGE BROOKER.'"

Right upon the heels of this letter came a note from my friend's wife, as follows:

"My dear Mr. Graves:- I will be greatly obliged if you can spare the time to pay my husband a visit very soon. He is not himself here lately, and I am afraid I shall have to encounter a great trouble, the secret dread of which has made life a burthen to me for many weeks ever since your last visit, in fact. You have a strong influence over Mr. Brooker, who loves you and esteems your opinion. I do not doubt but your coming will be a great benefit to him. Do not delay, as there is evidently a crisis approaching, and the Doctor seems so unstrung and nervous in the contemplation of it that I fear he cannot be depended upon. Very truly yours,

"ELIZABETH BROOKER."

I immediately wrote to George, notifying him that I would be up to see him on the eighth day ensuing. I could not go sooner, because some of my business could not be adjourned nor deputed. In answer he wrote me a hurried and almost illegible note, saying that he would be very glad to see me, and concluding thus:

"Buy for me and bring up with you a complete eight-horse-power low-pressure steam-engine, with boiler, gearing, and everything complete for immediately going to work. I shall want several bandwheels, large and small, and an extra quantity of the best leather bands. My invention is perfect and works like a charm. I shall be the richest man that lives, or ever has lived! Congratulate me, and come to share my inconceivable good fortune.

"In haste, your friend,