She drew her chair near to him. “Listen. What would I do? I’d go and get it for _myself_. Now you’d better go home, my lad. This is all I can do for you this morning. Go to work and honestly earn your money. There, don’t say that Moll Pitcher has not given you good advice, and I won’t charge you anything for it.” The disappointed boy dragged his feet back to the smithy over the highways and byways during the long autumn afternoon, and sank down at last on the doorsill of the shop, where the vision of Lord Dexter’s magnificence had appeared to him. Blingo came and leaned over him. “Well, what did she tell you?” “She couldn’t find it,” said Tommy. “What did she say?” “She only said if she knew where the money was, she’d get it _herself_.” THE “DARBY RING.”[3] When I was young, it was common to hear boys upon the skating ponds speak of “cutting the Darby,” by which expression they were supposed to indicate a swift ring movement upon the ice. The term, I believe, is still used, although comparatively few people may be acquainted with its origin. It came into use through a very singular occurrence, which for a time was the one great local event of a considerable farming and maritime region stretching along the northeastern shore of Narragansett Bay. In the summer of 1798, many respectable persons, whose homes were in the pleasant towns of Bristol, Warren, and Barrington, R. I., together with some few in the neighboring communities of Swansea and Rehoboth, Mass., were made the victims of a queer delusion. A short time previous, a man named Darby, or Derby,—the first being the form generally accepted by tradition,—had come to Warren from some part of Connecticut, taken up his abode in the town, and opened a school. As he was a person of pleasing address, he soon became a decided favorite with the honest sea-captains and farmers, who constituted the “solid men” of a population at once rural and commercial. A keen judge of human nature, he knew how to adapt his speech to suit the character of the person whose sympathies he wished to engage; while the fact that he was a schoolmaster made his utterances oracular to a degree with a people to whom the “Columbiad” of good Joel Barlow was the only known classic. He was fond of conversing upon mineralogy; and thence gliding easily into necromancy and kindred subjects, he would dwell upon the possibility of unearthing buried treasure through the exercise of some mysterious art akin to the supernatural. [3] Adapted from a story by Mr. George Coomer in “Youth’s Companion.” With abundant citations and authorities at his tongue’s end, he would call up the traditions of Kidd, Bellamy and other freebooters, and show how probable it was that much of their ill-gotten gain remained somewhere hidden about the New England shores.