“Neither do I,” agreed Tom, as he took down his father’s Bible. “Let’s see,” and he ran rapidly through the list of books at the front. “I have it—‘Cant.’ is short for ‘Canto,’ which is Latin for song.”
“The Song of Solomon,” I ventured.
“Of course,” said Tom, and he turned to it.
I have since learned that our reasoning upon this occasion was not so brilliant as I then thought it, and that “Cant.” is an abbreviation of “Canticles,” the scholarly name for the Song of Songs. However, we had guessed rightly, although our logic was at fault, and we found the verse we were looking for at the beginning of the second chapter: “I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.”
Tom pored over it for a moment, then looked up.
“I believe I’ve found it!” he cried. “See, four words to the right gives us ‘and the lily,’ then over here in the next column, ‘by.’ Then three diagonally, ‘my trees among.’ ‘And the lily by my trees among’—that isn’t very good English, but it means something, anyway. If there is a lily among the trees—”
“But,” I objected, “the words may not be arranged the same way in grandaunt’s Bible.”
“That’s so,” he assented, plunged into despondency again. “We’ll have to look at her Bible and see. In the meantime, there’s the apple-tree and the plum. Perhaps the treasure is in a cavity in one of them.”
“Don’t forget the early potato,” laughed Dick. “I see clearly that we’ll have to dig up the whole place, chop down the orchard, and perhaps tear down the house, if we expect to follow up all these clues. We’ve got a large job on hand.”
There was nothing more to be discovered in the library, so we put the books we had been consulting back in their places and went down-stairs to join our elders. We found them still talking over the various aspects of the problem, and sat down to listen.