LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 806, 22 January 1877, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE SACKFUL OF SOVEREIGNS. A WONDERFUL STORY OF CHRISTMAS LUCK. ( Concluded .) ‘A spade, a spade,’ calls out Tom, ‘or a , pick of some sort!’ ii ‘ Lilian, go to the tool-house,’ cries her ! father. And the child, who is only half-way down 5 the slope, runs back, and soon reappears, | straggling with a spade. : Alice relieves the little hands of their un- | wuildy burden, and takes it down to Tom, f sending the child back to the house for fear | of her taking cold. £ Five minutes pass, and the sailor, by I hacking at the bushes and delving into the earth, has laid bare the top of a queer-look-ing, half-bricked, half-tiled sort of structure He lifts away some of the tiles with which a portion of it is covered, and discloses the upper end of a large leathern sack, all mouldy and begrimed, having a kind of brass binding and hasp fastened by a rusty padlock. With low-muttered exclamations from Tom, and much gasping and puffing fioin George, by degrees a regular clearance is made, and there lies exposed to view the whole of an enormous sack, nearly five feet long and three feet wide ! A clasp-knife flies out from the sailor’s pocket, the leather is ripped open, aud the sack is discovered to be crammed with a succession of canvas bags. With some difficulty, for it is very heavy, Tom, having handed the spade to George, is the first to lift one of these out. It is firmly tied at the mouth with strong string and sealed, and has a parchment label, with the sum £IOOO in j figures marked upon it. Again the knife is ! used with more impatience than ever, and | Tom, dipping his hand in, produces a dozen or more bright sovereigns. ’ ‘ Hurrah, hurrah ! Here it is, then,’ cries Tom —‘the main bulk of my propertyhidden, buried, after the fashion of our old money box. And here it has lain certainly for five, and who can say for how many more years V’ 1 Bag by bag is removed from the leathern s .ck, the sample which has been opened explains what they each are filled with. There they are—forty of them, all alike, tied and labelled alike ; each weighing about seventeen pounds : a solid mass of some six hundredweight of gold ! ‘Total,’ says George, with a facetious assumption of the banker’s air, when, with much labour and hurrying to and fro, everything has been conveyed very quietly and secretly into the house, ‘ £40,000 iu gold !’ , The surprise, the excitement, and the ! general commotion which went on while

these facts were being arrived at no words can describe. However, there was Matthew Hickman’s accumulated wealth at last, standing in forty bags upon the table and floor in the parlor. But how bis heirs and executors behaved, and what they said, must in detail be left to the imagination. They walked round it, and felt it, moved first one bag and then another to try if they were all of the same weight. Then they counted a few sovereigns from the bag that had been opened, and put them in again ; and the whole time they were all talking, every one of them, all at once, and not a soul listening. They exclaimed, they wondered, they laughed, and, of course, Alice cried, and Lilian followed suit. And it is quite impossible to say how long this sort of thing went on, for everything they did they did fifty times, and everything they said they said at least a hundred times over and over again, and the performance might have lasted till * crack of doom,’ but for the closng in of the short Christmas-day. This seemed to suggest a practical remark to George, and to which at length the rest seemed inclined to listen. ‘lt is all very well,’ he cried, ‘ but we can’t dine off gold, at least not at present, and I’m getting hungry.’ Then it suddenly occurred to them all that they were hungry; and then the good old fashioned general servant, who had been looking in from time to time at the parlourdoor, and who had not yet quite mastered what had happened, was told to bring dinner. So, finally, the treasure was stowed away in a corner, just, Tom said, as if it had been so many bags of sawdust, such as ho used to have in his toy miller’s cart, and which he always stabled in the self-same corner. Whilst the cloth was being laid the whole party looked out of the window, apparently entirely absorbed by their own thoughts. After a long silence, Tom said, as he gazed absently in the direction of the little sum-mer-house, ‘ That’s where he got them.’ ‘ Got what ? ’ inquired George. ‘The materials to make his strong-room with. As I looked through the bushes just now I perceived some remnants of old tiles, and I saw at a glance they were the same sort as those in that patch in the roof of the summer-house. They would not have suggested anything in themselves; but seeing them where I did, with what I had in my mind, they confirmed my suspicion, and the first kick or two I gave to the earth settled the question. ’ ‘ Why, of course,’ exclaimed George ; ‘the old gentleman had the roof mended while we were away that year, not a month before he died, and no doubt he secreted some of the workmen’s materials for this purpose.’ ‘ Only fancy ? ’ cried Alice; ‘ and the sack where did he get the sack, do you think? ’ ‘O, simply had it made years ago, no doubt, Avhen this idea first possessed him,’ was Tom’s rejoinder. ‘Well, God bless him,’ said Alice; ‘he never meant that we should have so much trouble about it all, poor dear father ! God bless him, I say again.’ And they all answered, ‘ Amen. ’ Presently after this the Christmas feast was served, and we may be pretty sure that there was not a merrier or happier Christmas dinner party throughout the length and breadth of the land to be found that day. There was no melancholy tone in the talk now; it was all in the bright high happy key. ‘ And why not ? ’ asks George, ‘lf grandfather had not buried the money in the orchard, why, I might have buried it in the copper mine—who knows? Ho, it is all for the best, depend upon it; and I call it a wonderful story of Christmas luck. Tom will have half, and Alice will have half— twenty thousand pounds apiece—and we will invest the whole in the Three Per Cents. That will be enough for us, won’t it? Yes, wonderful luck,’ he continued; ‘ only I can’t make out about my dream, for it must be a dream, after all; it could uot have been anything else.’ ‘Ah, so we may say,’ broke in Tom solemnly, ‘ and so most people would say ; and they would tell you that it was my talking about the “doll’s nest” just before we went to bed that started the dream in your head, George ; but I’m not for having f everything cut aad dried and explained in | this matter-of-fact sort of fashion. I say I ! have seen enough to know that it can’t be j done; things happen in this world that } bailie the wisest—that is, if those can be i counted the wisest who are not inclined £ s unetimes to accept mysterious dispensations as the ruling of a higher power than man’s. Just for two or three minutes everybody looked grave; but after that they soon recovered, and the merry-making was resumed without one jot of alloy—resumed and kept up until a quite absurdly late hour for the inhabitants of the little quiet home upon the Highgate slope.