n wealth.

"The biggest mystery, though, of all the queer things that have
happened here in the last hundred years was the arrival of the man from
St. John's when I was a youngster. He claimed to have the very chart
showing the exact spot where Kidd's gold was buried. He said he had
got it from an old negro in St. John's who was with Captain Kidd when
he was coasting the islands in this bay. He showed up here when old
Captain Chase that lived here then was off to sea in his vessel. So he
waited around a few days till the captain returned, for he wanted to
use a mariner's compass to locate the spot according to the directions
on the chart.

"When Captain Chase came ashore the two went off up the beach together,
and the man from St. John's was never seen again, neither hide nor hair
of him, and it is plumb certain that he wasn't set off in a boat from
Jewell's.

"The folks here found a great hole dug on the southeast shore which
looked as if a large chest had been lifted out of it. Of course
conclusions were drawn, but nobody got at the truth. Four years ago
someone found a skeleton in the woods, unburied, simply dropped into a
crevice in the rocks with a few stones thrown over it. No one knows
whose body it was, although some say,--but never mind about that. This
old Captain Jonathan Chase was said to have been a pirate, and his
house was full of underground passages and sliding panels and queer
contraptions, such as no honest, law-abiding man could have any use
for."

The worthy Benjamin Franklin was an admirable guide for young men, a
sound philosopher, and a sagacious statesman, but he cannot be credited
with romantic imagination. He would have been the last person in the
world to lead a buried treasure expedition or to find pleasure in the
company of the most eminent and secretive pirate that ever scuttled a
ship or made mysterious marks upon a well-thumbed chart plentifully
spattered with candle-grease and rum. He even took pains to discourage
the diverting industry of treasure seeking as it flourished among his
Quaker neighbors and discharged this formidable broadside in the course
of a series of essays known as "The Busy-Body Series":

"... There are among us great numbers of honest artificers and laboring
people, who, fed with a vain hope of suddenly growing rich, neglect
their business, almost to the ruining of themselves and families, and
voluntarily endure abundance of fatigue in a fruitless se