'Nay, this be older nor smugglers,' said Joe, with a glance at the solid workmanship and the quaint carving on the old lid, 'unless they made use of an old thing for their own purposes. Let be, Master Bobby, I can't do nothing with you hangin' over me like this!'
He had been fumbling with the ancient rusty lock while he spoke, and it now broke away from the rotten woodwork. He flung back the heavy lid, and revealed—neither gold nor jewels, nothing but a pile of musty-looking old parchments and books. The children looked at each other in blank disappointment.
'There might be something underneath,' said Peggy, beginning to rummage the chest to the very bottom; but her hopes were soon dashed, for a further search did not bring anything more to light.
'How disgusting! Who cares for old books?' exclaimed Bobby, whose heart had been set on stolen jewels, smuggled valuables, or daggers and firearms at the least.
'They're very funny ones, at any rate,' said Peggy, picking up one of the despised tomes. 'Just look at the backs. They're so thick and heavy. They seem to be made of metal of some kind, with little bits of coloured glass stuck into them; but they're terribly tarnished and dirty. I can't read the writing inside at all, and there are the queerest little pictures all round the edges of the pages.'
'What be I to do with the box?' asked Joe, gazing at their find in some perplexity. 'And be I to dig another hole for the burial, miss, or not?'
Her thoughts recalled to the melancholy occasion, Peggy flung down the book, and her grief broke forth anew.
'We'll bury him in the old stone coffin,' she declared. 'We'll line it with leaves and primroses, and then lay him in, and just drop on the lid again. I'm glad he should have a real coffin, after all, and the Abbey's almost as good as the churchyard, for Father says lots of the old monks must have been buried here, if we could only find their graves.'
Even Ophelia could not have chosen a more flowery resting-place, for the children covered poor Rollo with violets, primroses, and white sloe-blossom. Joe carefully replaced the lid, and shovelled on the soil again, heaping it up, and smoothing it with the flat of his spade, in imitation of the village sexton.
Father had refused to allow gunpowder, so the pistol was useless, but Peggy placed a wreath of white jonquils picked from her own garden upon the grave, and dropped so many tears over it that I do not think any dog could have been more truly mourned and regretted.