"My difficulty," said Mr. Eames, "was to discover something which I could do, and at the same time something that would please your aunt. Now I think I've found the exact thing." "Uncle Timothy," said Beth, "I don't believe Aunt Agatha is as bad as that. I know she's really fond of you. She won't be pleased. She really won't. She'll be very sorry, heartbroken, when you tell her that you've dug your grave." "My grave! My dear Beth! Dug my grave! But I haven't. Nothing of the sort." "Then what on earth were you digging?" said Beth. "That," said the vicar, "is quite a long story." It was; but he told it. Sitting on a flat tombstone with Beth on the grass at his feet, and Jimmy, fairly comfortable, full stretch on the bier. Years before, soon after coming to Hailey Compton, the vicar had heard that there was some connection between the church and the cave. A legend existed, repeated without conviction by the old people in the parish, that the smugglers, in the irreverent days of the eighteenth century, used to store their goods in the church itself. But such stories are common all over England. There is scarcely an ancient church but rumour speaks of a covered way between it and a cave or the ruins of a monastery or a house which occupies the site of what was once a baron's castle. There is at least one church which tradition insists on connecting with a neighbouring public-house. If that passage could be found--and traces of it were discovered lately by men engaged in making a drain--it might be used as an argument by temperance reformers to demonstrate that an immoral alliance has always existed between the church and the brewery. Or by the advocates of more and better beer, to prove that the church, in the days when its faith was still undefiled by Henry VIII and Elizabeth, was not hostile to the natural joys of life. Such is the peculiar value of arguments based on historical and archæological research. They can be used with equal force on either side in any modern dispute. Mr. Eames, knowing the untrustworthy nature of local legends, paid no particular attention to that which connected his church with the smugglers' cave, and might never have investigated the matter if he had not been troubled by a loose board in the floor of the pew to which he had retired to read Epictetus. Day after day this board wobbled and shook under the leg of his chair when he sat down. He remembered the same thing happening when he had retired to the church for a few days during the starting of his wife's plays. Then, since he did not stay long, the thing had not mattered much. On the occasion of the pageant it became a serious annoyance. It was no use moving the chair, for wherever he put it one of its legs stood on a loose board. It appeared that nearly all the boards in the floor of that pew were loose.