“Do that yourself, Miss Dolly. Remember it was you who first found the ‘treasure!’” returned Mr. Stillwell and merrily passed it on to her.
She didn’t hesitate. In a twinkling her fingers had discovered where a lid was fitted on and had lifted it. There was something in the box after all! A closely folded bit of paper—No, parchment—on which was writing. This wasn’t in French as the map had been inscribed, but in quaintly formed, old-fashioned characters, and the legend was this:
“Who hides his money in the earth
Is but a fool, whate’er his birth;
And he who tries to dig it thence
Expecting pounds, should find but pence.
The hider is but half a wit,
The seeker’s brains are smaller yet,
For who to chance his labor sells
Is only fit for cap and bells.”
“Take my share of this wonderful ‘treasure’,” cried Mrs. Jabb, when the momentary silence following the reading of this rhyme had been broken by Corny’s laughter.
“And mine!” “And mine!” “And mine, for my great-great-grandfather’s sister was—How was that, dear Colonel? About our great-great-grandmother’s—father’s—relationship? Well, I know one thing, I’ll never believe in any such foolishness again! I never did really, you know, I only—”
“Oh! nonsense, Dolly! A girl who is so interested she catches up a paperknife—” reproved Aurora, who had herself ruined a table knife.
“Aunt Betty, that’s true! I did break it—I mean—”
“I did that, Madam, and I fear I can never travel to Damascus to fetch you another; but what I can do I will do. Vote of the company! Attention, please! Does not this quaint old ‘cap and bells’ belong of right to Mrs. Calvert?” demanded and explained Cornwallis Stillwell holding the little metal head in the air.
“No, no, to you! to you!”
To Dorothy, the most amusing feature of the whole affair was the earnestness with which each and every one of them denied that they had ever had any faith in the old tradition.