swore by the legend that
golden treasure was hidden in their valley and that it would not be
found until sought for by the son of a stranger. At length, while a
newly drained field was being plowed, a large rock was shattered by
blasting, and under it were found many solid gold bracelets of antique
pattern and cunningly ornamented. The old people knew that the
prophecy had come true, for the youth who held the plow was the son of
an Englishman, a rare being in those parts a few generations ago.

Everyone knows that Ireland is fairly peppered with "crocks o' goold"
which the peasantry would have dug up long before this, but the
treasure is invariably in the keeping of "the little black men" and
they raise the divil and all with the bold intruder, and lucky he is if
he is not snatched away, body, soul, and breeches. Many a fine lad has
left home just before midnight with a mattock under his arm, and maybe
there was a terrible clap of thunder and that was the last of him
except the empty hole and the mattock beside it which his friends found
next morning.

In France treasure seeking has been at times a popular madness. The
traditions of the country are singularly alluring, and perhaps the most
romantic of them is that of the "Great Treasure of Gourdon" which is
said to have existed since the reign of Clovis in the sixth century.
The chronicle of all the wealth buried in the cemetery of this convent
at Gourdon in the Department of the Lot has been preserved, including
detailed lists of gold and silver, rubies, emeralds and pearls. The
convent was sacked and plundered by the Normans, and the treasurer, or
custodian, who had buried all the valuables of the religious houses
under the sway of the same abbot, was murdered while trying to escape
to the feudal seignor of Gourdon with the crosier of the lord abbott.
"The head of the crosier was of solid gold," says an ancient
manuscript, "and the rubies with which it was studded of such wondrous
size that at one single blow the soldier who tore it from the monk's
grasp and used it as a weapon against him, beat in his brains as with a
sledge-hammer."

Not only through the Middle Ages was the search resumed from time to
time, but from the latter days of the reign of Louis XIV until the
Revolution, tradition relates that the cemetery of the convent was
ransacked at frequent intervals. At length, in 1842, the quest was
abandoned after antiquarians, geologists, and engineers ha