arden, and there, in one of the
summer-houses, did examine them, and do find them so well advanced in
their learning, that I was amazed at it: they repeating a whole ode
without book out of Horace, and did give me a very good account of any
thing almost, and did make me very readily very good Latin, and did give
me good account of their Greek grammar, beyond all possible expectation;
and so grave and manly as I never saw, I confess, nor could have believed;
so that they will be fit to go to Cambridge in two years at most. They
are both little, but very like one another, and well-looked children.
Then in to my Lady again, and staid till it was almost night again, and
then took leave for a great while again, but with extraordinary kindness
from my Lady, who looks upon me like one of her own family and interest.
So thence, my wife and people by the highway, and I walked over the park
with Mr. Shepley, and through the grove, which is mighty pretty, as is
imaginable, and so over their drawbridge to Nun's Bridge, and so to my
father's, and there sat and drank, and talked a little, and then parted.
And he being gone, and what company there was, my father and I, with a
dark lantern; it being now night, into the garden with my wife, and there
went about our great work to dig up my gold. But, Lord! what a tosse I
was for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it was; that I
begun heartily to sweat, and be angry, that they should not agree better
upon the place, and at last to fear that it was gone but by and by poking
with a spit, we found it, and then begun with a spudd to lift up the
ground. But, good God! to see how sillily they did it, not half a foot
under ground, and in the sight of the world from a hundred places, if any
body by accident were near hand, and within sight of a neighbour's window,
and their hearing also, being close by: only my father says that he saw
them all gone to church before he begun the work, when he laid the money,
but that do not excuse it to me. But I was out of my wits almost, and the
more from that, upon my lifting up the earth with the spudd, I did discern
that I had scattered the pieces of gold round about the ground among the
grass and loose earth; and taking up the iron head-pieces wherein they
were put, I perceive the earth was got among the gold, and wet, so that
the bags were all rotten, and all the notes, that I could not tell what in
the world to say to it, not knowing how