“‘No truly,’ says the Gentleman, ‘to be so open with you, we shall never get quite over it unless we can find this old Deed; which, however, I hope we shall find, for I intend to make a general Search for it.’ “‘I wish with all my Heart you may find it, Sir,’ says the Doctor. “‘I don’t doubt but I shall; I had a strange Dream about it but last Night,’ says the Gentleman. “‘A Dream about the Writing!’ says the Doctor. ‘I hope it was that you should find it then?’ ‘I dream’d,’ says the Gentleman, ‘that a strange Gentleman came to me, that I had never seen in my Life, and help’d me to look it. I don’t know but you may be the Man.’ “‘I should be very glad to be the Man, I am sure,’ says the Doctor.” But Defoe is lengthy, and it need only be said that all went well; the Deed was found without ado, and all—save the cousins—were satisfied. “The wife of one of Johnson’s acquaintance,” Boswell says, “made a purse for herself out of her husband’s fortune. Feeling a proper compunction in her last moments, she confessed how much she had secreted; but before she could tell where it was placed, she was seized with a convulsive fit and expired.” It is in tales of buried treasure that the subject of wills is, perhaps, most nearly connected with ghosts. As the water-finder feels the presence of water, so the sensitive sees in concrete form the presence of hidden wealth. There is a story of a field in Kent, where a ghostly old man was seen to boil his pot on stormy nights: upon that spot a hoard of coins was subsequently found. At Bryn yr Ellyllon, or Goblin Hill, in Wales, a woman saw a figure of superhuman height, clad in gold, disappear within the mound, where, on excavation, a skeleton was discovered in a corselet of Etruscan gold. There was a strong probability, when men buried away their gold, that at death the hoard might be unknown, or its hiding-place undivulged, to the living. “Nothing,” says the historian of Apparitions, “has more fill’d the idle Heads of the old Women of these latter Ages than the Stories of Ghosts and Apparitions coming to People, to tell them where money was hidden, and how to find it; and ’tis wonderful to me that such Tales should make such Impressions, and that sometimes among wise and judicious People too, as we find they have done. How many old Houses have been almost pull’d down, and Pitts fruitlessly dug in the Earth, at the ridiculous Motion of pretended Apparitions?”