The tiny hamlet of Hardwick, dignified with mention on the Ordnance map, is passed without its existence being noticed, and the road, flat as though constructed with the aid of a spirit-level, proceeds straight ahead for the town of Huntingdon, swinging acutely to the left for York. Beyond, at the cross-roads, stands Brampton Hut, the modern vivid red-brick successor of the old inn of that name. Brampton village lies down the cross-road to the right, and is the place where Samuel Pepys, it is thought, was born in 1632. {117} The registers afford no information, for they do not begin until twenty-one years later, and the old gossip himself makes no mention of the fact. His father and mother lived here, and both lie in the church. Their home, his birthplace, stands even now, but so altered that it is practically without much interest. It was in its garden, in October, 1666, that Samuel caused his £1,300 to be buried when the Dutch descent upon London was feared. A timorous soul, poor Samuel! sending his father and his wife down from London to Brampton with the gold, and with £300 in a girdle round where his waist should have been, but was not, for Samuel was a man of “full habit,” as the elegant phrase, seeking to disguise the accusation of exceeding fatness, has it. Great was his anxiety when, the national danger over, he came down to disinter his hoard. “My father and I with a dark lantern, it being now night, into the garden with my wife, and there went about our great work to dig up my gold. But Lord! what a tosse I was for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it was; but by and by, poking with a spit, we found it, and then begun with a spudd to lift up the ground.” But they had not been cautious in their work. “Good God!” says he, “to see how sillily they hid it, not half a foot under ground, in sight of passers-by and from the neighbours’ windows.” Then he found the gold all loose, and the notes decaying with the damp, and all the while, routing about among the dirt for the scattered pieces, he was afraid lest the neighbours should see him, and fancy the Pepys family had discovered a gold mine; so he took up dirt and all, and, carrying it to his brother’s bedroom, washed it out with the aid of several pails of water and some besoms, with the result that he was still over a hundred pieces short. This “made him mad.” He could not go out in the garden with his father, because the old man was deaf, and, in shouting to him, all the neighbours would get to know. So he went out with W. Hewer, and by diligent grubbing in the mould, made the sum nearly tally. The day after, leaving his father to search for the remainder, we find him setting out for London, with his belongings; the gold in a basket in the coach, and he coming to look after it every quarter of an hour.