_The wonderful Story of Oak Island.--The Circle in the Forest.--Digging for Gold.--Exciting Discoveries.--Far down in the Depths of the Earth.--The Treasure touched at last.--The Treasure snatched away.--A new Search, and its Results.--Boring through the Chest of Gold.--A Company.--A new Pit made.--The Drain.--New Efforts.--The Coffer Dam.--New Companies.--Captain Kidd too much for them._ I BELIEVE.” said the landlord, “there’s always been a talk, among the people around here, that Captain Kidd used this place as a kind of headquarters; and this idea seems to me to have come down from old settlers who might have been here in his own day,--French and others,--though Chester wasn’t actually settled till long after his time. At any rate, there it was, and everybody used always to believe that Captain Kidd hid his money somewhere in this bay. Well, nothing very particular happened till some sixty years ago, when a man, on visiting Oak Island, just by chance saw something which seemed to him very curious. “The island was overgrown with oaks and other trees intermixed. Now, right in the midst of these trees, he came to a queer-looking place. It was circular, and about fifteen feet in diameter. Trees grew all around it. Just on this circular spot, however, nothing grew at all, not even moss or ferns. It looked as if it had been cursed, or blasted. The trees were all around it--some oak and some maple; but among them was one,--pine or spruce, I don’t know which,--and this one looked a good deal older than the others. One of the boughs of this old pine tree projected right over the blasted circular spot in a very singular fashion, and on this the man noticed something that looked like very queer growth for a pine tree. He climbed up, and found that it was a pulley, which was so rotten that it might have been hanging there a hundred years. It was fastened to the bough by a chain, and this was so rusty that it broke in his hands. This pulley and rusty chain the man removed and took with him. “Of course, as you may imagine, he was a good deal struck by the appearance of things. He had always heard that Captain Kidd had once frequented Mahone Bay, and had buried treasure somewhere about; and here he had discovered this blasted spot with a pulley over it, in the very midst of the woods on a lonely island--a place that looked as though no one had ever been there but himself since that pulley was last used. Of course he asked himself what the meaning of all this was; and to him it seemed most likely that the circular space marked some pit in the ground, and that the pulley had been used to lower things down into this pit.