that it is the best thing that could happen to me.
I think, on the whole, I would rather have steady work and fair wages
all the season than find a crock of gold.'

"Here was wisdom. The remark of the honest trench-digger at once set in
motion a train of thought in the mind of the author. He entered his
study, wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper these words, 'The
Crock of Gold, a Tale of Covetousness,' and in less than a week
that remarkable story was written. By the advice of his wife, however,
he spent another week in rewriting it, and then gave it to the world in
its finished state."

In the same Butlerian volume occurs the following MS. notice written by
me (in about 1853) respecting the origins of my two other tales, the
three being issued together:--

"As in the instance of my 'Crock of Gold,' both 'The Twins' and 'Heart'
were undoubtedly the outcome in after years of early observations,
anecdotes, and incidents, whereof memory kept in silence an experimental
record. Very few artists succeed in the delineation of life without
living models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they
rather get hints from than actually copy. Thus though I sketched Roger
Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage
near Postford Pond as his home,--adding thereto Mr. Campion's park and
house at Danney, near Hurst (I was then living at Brighton) as the model
for Sir John Vincent's estate,--as well as Grace, Ben Burke, and so on
from persons I had seen,--I need not say that my sketches from nature
were but outlines to my finished work of art. Simon Jennings, however,
is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton. So also with these
tales, and others of my writings."

About "The Twins" a curious and somewhat awkward coincidence happened,
in the fact that my totally ideal characters of General Tracey and his
family were supposed to be intended for some persons whom the cap (it
seems) fitted pretty accurately, and who then lived at the southern
watering-place I had too diaphanously depicted as Burleigh-Singleton. It
is somewhat dangerous to invent blindly. However, my total innocence of
any intentional allusion to private matters whereof I was entirely
ignorant was set clear at once by an explanatory letter; and so no harm
resulted. In the case of "Heart" similarly, I invented the bankruptcy of
a certain Austral Bank, which at the time of my tale's publication had
no existence,--the very n