he
absurdity of Roger's scheme was evident even to himself, and with a bare
"Good day, Master," he hurriedly took his bundle from the counter, and
scuttled out as quick as he could.

His feelings, walking homeward, were any thing but pleasant; the bubble
of his ardent hope was burst: he never could have more than the paltry
little sum he carried in that bundle: what a miser he would be of it:
how mean it now seemed in his eyes--a mere sample-bag of seed, instead
of the wide-waving harvest! Ah, well; he would save and scrape--ay, and
go back to toil again--do any thing rather than spend.

Got home, the difficulty now recurred, where was he to hide it? The
store was a greater care than ever, now those rascally bankers knew of
it. He racked his brain to find a hiding-place, and, at length, really
hit upon a good one. He concealed the crock, now replenished with its
contents, in the thatch just over his bed's head: it was a rescued
darling: so he tore a deep hole, and nested it quite snugly.

Perhaps it did not matter much, but the rain leaked in by that hole all
night, and fortunate Roger woke in the morning drenched with wet, and
racked by rheumatism.

CHAPTER XIX.

CALUMNY.

MORE blessings issue from the crock; Pandora's box is set wide
open, and all the sweet inhabitants come forth. If apprehensions for its
safety made the finder full of care, the increased whisperings of the
neighbourhood gave him even deeper reason for anxiety. In vain he told
lie upon lie about a legacy of some old uncle in the clouds; in vain he
stuck to the foolish and transparent falsehood, with a dogged
pertinacity that appealed, not to reason, but to blows; in vain he made
affirmation weaker by his oath, and oaths quite unconvincing by his
cudgel: no one believed him: and the mystery was rendered more
inexplicable from his evidently nervous state and uneasy terror of
discovery.

He had resolved at the outset, cunningly as he fancied, to change no
more than one piece of gold in the same place; though Bacchus's
undoubtedly proved the rule by furnishing an exception: and the
consequence came to be, that there was not a single shop in the whole
county town, nor a farm-house in all the neighbourhood round, where
Roger Acton had not called to change a sovereign. True, the silver had
seldom been forthcoming; still, he had asked for it; and where in life
could he have got the gold? Many was the rude questioner, whose
curiosity had been