Men of science and art then passed their days in a bustle of the marvellous. I will furnish a specimen of philosophical correspondence in a letter to old John Aubrey. The writer betrays the versatility of his curiosity by very opposite discoveries. "My hands are so full of work that I have no time to transcribe for Dr. Henry More an account of the Barnstable apparition--Lord Keeper North would take it kindly from you--give a sight of this letter from Barnstable to Dr. Whitchcot." He had lately heard of a Scotchman who had been carried by fairies into France; but the purpose of his present letter is to communicate other sort of apparitions than the ghost of Barnstable. He had gone to Glastonbury, "to pick up a few berries from the holy thorn which flowered every Christmas day."[205] The original thorn had been cut down by a military saint in the civil wars; but the trade of the place was not damaged, for they had contrived not to have a single holy thorn, but several, "by grafting and inoculation."[206] He promises to send these "berries;" but requests Aubrey to inform "that person of quality who had rather have a _bush_, that it was impossible to get one for him. I am told," he adds, "that there is a person about Glastonbury who hath a nursery of them, which he sells for a crown a piece," but they are supposed not to be "of the right kind." The main object of this letter is the writer's "suspicion of gold in this country;" for which he offers three reasons. Tacitus says there was gold in England, and that Agrippa came to a spot where he had a prospect of Ireland--from which place he writes; secondly, that "an honest man" had in this spot found stones from which he had extracted good gold, and that he himself "had seen in the broken stones a clear appearance of gold;" and thirdly, "there is a story which goes by tradition in that part of the country, that in the hill alluded to there was a door into a hole, that when any wanted money they used to go and knock there, that a woman used to appear, and give to such as came.[207] At a time one by greediness or otherwise gave her offence, she flung to the door, and delivered this old saying, still remembered in the country: 'When all _the Daws_ be gone and dead, Then.... Hill shall shine gold red.'