“Well, he went home, and didn’t say anything about it to a living soul, except his son, a young man, whom he wanted to help him. He determined to examine deeper, and after talking it over with his son, he was more determined than ever. So the very next day they began their preparations, taking over picks, and spades, and ropes, and provisions, and everything that could be needed for their purpose. “They went to work and dug away for a little distance, when they came to something hard. It was a stone hewn,--not very smooth,--a kind of sandstone, and on this they saw some marks that looked like strange letters. They were ignorant men, but they knew the alphabet, and they knew that this was no kind of English letters at all; but it seemed to them that they might be letters of some strange alphabet. They took this stone away, and it’s been preserved ever since, and it’s there yet on the island, built into the wall of a cottage there for safe keeping. I’ve seen it myself dozens of times. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve seen the traces of Captain Kidd, for it’s my solemn conviction that he cut that inscription on the stone in some foreign letters, or perhaps in some secret cipher. “After taking out that stone, they went on digging harder than ever, and about two feet down they came to a sort of wooden flooring. The wood was in good preservation, and consisted of large logs, a dozen feet long, laid across side by side, and rough-hewed about six inches square. They thought that they had come to the money-hole now, for sure, and pulled up the logs quick enough, you’d better believe; but they didn’t know what was before them. After taking up the beams, they found they had to dig deeper; and so they went on digging away deeper and deeper. It took a long time, for they had to stay up the earth as they dug down, to prevent it from falling in, and they soon found that the job was a bigger one than they had bargained for; but what they had already found excited them, and cheered them on day after day.