Our Pirate Hoard: 1891Janvier, Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone)
General
Our Pirate Hoard: 1891
Janvier, Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone)
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Then we examined the cow-stable--we thought it better to call it a
cow-stable than a shed--and I pulled out my foot-rule and measured it
inside. It was a very little cow-stable, but, as Susan suggested, if
we could not get a small grown-up cow to fit it, "we might begin with a
young cow, and teach her, as she grew larger, to accommodate herself to
her quarters by standing cat-a-cornered, like the man who used to carry
oxen up a mountain." Susan's allusions are not always very clearly
stated, though her meaning, no doubt, always is quite clear in her own
mind. I may mention here that eventually we were so fortunate as to
obtain a middle-sized cow that got along in the stable very well. We
had a tidy colored girl who did the cooking and the rough part of the
house-work, and who could milk like a steam-engine.
As soon as we got fairly settled in our little home I began to look for
my great-great-great-uncle's buried treasure, but I cannot say that
at first I made much progress. I could not even find a trace of my
great-great-great-uncle's house in Lewes, and nobody seemed ever to have
heard of him. One day, though, I was so fortunate as to encounter a very
old man--known generally about Lewes as Old Jacob--who did remember "the
old pirate," as he irreverently called him, and who showed me where his
house had been. The house had burned down when he was a boy--seventy
years back, he thought it was--and across where it once had stood a
street had been opened. This put a stop to my search in that direction.
As Susan very justly observed, I could not reasonably expect the Lewes
people to let me dig up their streets like a gas-piper just on the
chance of finding my family fortune.
I was not very much depressed by this turn of events, for I was pretty
certain in my own mind that my great-great-great-uncle had not buried
his treasure on his own premises. The basis of this belief was
the difficulty--that must have been even greater in his time--of
transporting such heavy substances as gold and silver across the sandy
region between Lewes and where the _Martha Ann_ used to lie at anchor
in Rehoboth Bay. I reasoned that, the burial being but temporary, my
relative would have been much more likely to have interred his valuables
at some point on the land only a short distance from the _Martha Ann's_
anchorage. When I mentioned this theory to Susan she seemed to be very
much impressed by the common-sense of it, and as I have a great respect
for Susan's judgment, her acquiescence in my views strengthened my own
faith in them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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