ad heard with real amazement that uproarious huzzaing!
and, just as her father had levanted for the beer, glided down from her
closet, and received the wondrous tidings from her step-mother. She
heard in silence, if not in sadness: intuitive good sense proclaimed to
her that this sudden gush of wealth was a temptation, even if she felt
no secret fears on the score of--shall we call it superstition?--that
dream, this crock, that dark angel--and this so changed spirit of her
once religious father: what could she think? she meekly looked to Heaven
to avert all ill.

Mary Acton also was less elated and more alarmed than she cared to
confess: not that she, any more than Grace, knew or thought about lords
of manors, or physical troubles on the score of finding the crock: but
Mrs. Quarles's shawl, and sundry fearful fancies tinged with blood,
these worried her exceedingly, and made her look upon the gold with an
uneasy feeling, as if it were an unclean thing, a sort of Achan's wedge.

At last, here comes Roger back, somewhat unsteadily I fear, with a stone
two-gallon jar of what he was pleased to avouch to be "the down-right
stingo." "Hooray, Poll!" (he had not ceased shouting all the way from
Bacchus's,) "Hooray--here I be again, a gentle-folk, a lord, a king,
Poll: why daughter Grace, what's come to you? I won't have no dull looks
about to-day, girl. Isn't this enough to make a poor man merry? No more
troubles, no more toil, no more 'humble sarvent,' no more a ragged,
plodding ploughman: but a lord, daughter Grace--a great, rich, luxurious
lord--isn't this enough to make a man sing out hooray?--Thank the crock
of gold for this--Oh, blessed crock!"

"Hush, father, hush! that gold will be no blessing to you; Heaven send
it do not bring a curse. It will be a sore temptation, even if the
rights of it are not in some one else: we know not whom it may belong
to, but at any rate it cannot well be ours."

"Not ours, child? whose in life is it then?"

Mary Acton, made quite meek by a superstitious dread of having money of
the murdered, stepped in to Grace's help, whom her father's fierce
manner had appalled, with "Roger, it belonged to Mrs. Quarles, I'm
morally sure on it--and must now be Simon Jennings's, her heir."

"What?" he almost frantically shrieked, "shall that white hell-hound rob
me yet again? No, dame--I'll hang first! the crock I found, the crock
I'll keep: the money's mine, whoever did the murder." Then, changing hi