Nature and Human Nature

by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

“Well, in the morning, when he and his wife got up, he never spoke or thought any more about the dream, but as soon as breakfast was over, he and his man yoked up the oxen, put them to the cart, and lifted the harrow into it, and started for the field. The servant drove the team, and John walked behind with his head down, a turning over in his mind whether he couldn’t sell something off the farm to keep matters a-goin’ till I should return, when all at once, as they were passing through the wood, he observed that there was a line of silver dollars turned up by one of the wheels of the cart, and continued for the space of sixty feet and then ceased.

“The moment he saw the money he thought of his dream, and he was so overjoyed that he was on the point of calling out to the man to stop, but he thought it was more prudent as they were alone in the woods to say nothing about it. So he walked on, and joined the driver, and kept him in talk for awhile. And then, as if he had suddenly thought of something, said, ‘Jube, do you proceed to the field and go to work till I come. I shall have to go to the house for a short time.’

“Well, as soon as he got out of sight of the cart, off he ran home as hard as he could lay legs to it, only stopping to take up a handful of the coins to make sure they were real.

“‘Mary, Mary,’ sais he, ‘the dream has come true; I have found the money—see here is some of it; there is no mistake;’ and he threw a few pieces down on the hearth and rung them. ‘They are genuine Spanish crowns. Do you and Janet bring the market-basket, while I go for a couple of hoes, and let us gather it all up.’

“Well, sure enough, when we came to the place he mentioned, there was the wheel-track full of dollars. He and I hoed each side of the rut, which seemed to be in a sort of yellow powder, like the dust of rotten wood, and got out all we could find. We afterwards tried under the opposite wheel, and behind and before the rut, but could find no more, and when we got home we counted it, and found we had eighty-two pounds, five shillings.

“‘Well, this is a God-send, Mary, ain’t it?’ said brother; and she threw her arms round his neck, and cried for joy as she kissed him.”

“Which way,” said I, “show me, Miss, how she did it, only you may laugh instead of cry if you like.”

“Not being a wife,” said she, with great quietness, “I cannot show you myself, but you may imagine it, it will do just as well, or dream it, and that will do better.

“Well, John was a scrupulous man, and he was determined to restore the money, if he could find an owner for it; but he could hear of no one who had lost any, nor any tradition in that place that any one ever had done so since the first settlement of the country. All that he could discover was, that about forty years before, an old Frenchman had lived somewhere thereabouts alone, in the midst of the woods. Who he was, or what became of him, nobody knew; all he could hear was, that a party of lumbermen had, some years afterwards, found his house amidst a second growth of young wood that wholly concealed it, and that it contained his furniture, cooking utensils, and trunks, as he had left them. Some supposed he had been devoured by bears or wolves; others, that he had been lost in the woods; and some, that he had died by his own hands.

“On hearing this, John went to examine his habitation, or the remains of it, and he found that about four acres around it were covered with the second growth, as it is called, which was plainly to be distinguished from the forest, as the trees were not only not so large or so old as the neighbouring ones, but, as is always the case, were of a different description of wood altogether. On a careful inspection of the spot where he found the money, it appeared that the wheel had passed lengthways along an enormous old decayed pine, in the hollow of which he supposed the money must have been hid; and when the tree fell, the dollars had rolled along its centre fifty feet or more, and remained there until the wood was rotten, and had crumbled into dust.