I felt very well
pleased with the progress that I was making, and when I told Susan all
that Old Jacob had told me, she said that she looked upon the whole
matter as being as good as settled. Indeed, she kept me awake quite
a while that night while she sketched the outlines of the
journey in Europe that we would take as soon as I could get my
great-great-great-uncle's treasure dug up, and its non-interest-bearing
doubloons converted into interest-bearing bonds.

III.

The day after I had this talk with Old Jacob I was rather surprised by
getting a telegram from my cousin Gregory Wilkinson, telling me that he
was coming down to pay us a visit, and would be there that afternoon. I
was not as much astonished as I would have been if the telegram had come
from anybody else, because Gregory Wilkinson had a way of telegraphing
that he was going to do things which nobody expected him to do, and I
was used to it. Moreover, I had every reason for desiring to maintain
very friendly relations with him. He had told me several times that he
had made a will by which his large fortune was to be divided between
me and a certain Asylum for the Relief and Education of Destitute Red
Indian Children that he was very much interested in; and he had more
than hinted that the asylum was not the legatee that was the more to be
envied. This made me feel quite comfortable about the remote future, but
it did not simplify the problem of living comfortably in the immediate
present. My cousin was a very tough, wiry little man, barely turned of
fifty. There was any quantity of life left in him--his father, who had
been just such another, had lived till he was eighty-nine. There was not
much of a chance, therefore, that either the asylum or I would receive
anything from his estate for ever so long--and I may add I was very
glad, for my part, that things were that way. Gregory Wilkinson was a
first-rate fellow, for all his queerness and sudden ways, and I should
have been sorry enough to have been his chief heir. One reason why I
liked him so much was because he was so fond of Susan. When we were
married--although he had not seen her then--he sent her forks, and he
had lived up to those forks ever since.

Susan was rather flustered when I showed her the telegram; but she went
to work with a will, and got the little spare room in order, and stewed
some peaches and made some biscuits for supper. Susan's biscuits were
something extraordinary. Greg