ness; a wild-goose, with eyes of
blazing green, hovered and screamed above them. Though the witch had
promised them safety, nothing appeared to ward off the fantastic shapes
that began to crowd about them. Too terrified to work longer they sprang
out and made away, and when-taking courage from the sunshine--they
renewed the search, next day, the iron chest had vanished.
On Crown Point, Lake Champlain, is the ruin of a fort erected by Lord
Amherst above the site of a French work that had been thrown up in 1731
to guard a now vanished capital of fifteen hundred people. It was
declared that when the French evacuated the region they buried money and
bullion in a well, in the northwest corner of the bastion, ninety feet
deep, in the full expectancy of regaining it, and half a century ago this
belief had grown to such proportions that fifty men undertook to clear
the well, pushing their investigations into various parts of the
enclosure and over surrounding fields. They found quantities of lead and
iron and no gold.
Follingsby's Pond, in the Adirondacks, was named for a recluse, who, in
the early part of this century, occupied a lonely but strongly guarded
cabin there. It was believed afterward that he was an English army
officer, of noble birth, who had left his own country in disgust at
having discovered an attachment between his wife and one of his
fellow-officers. He died in a fever, and while raving in a delirium spoke
of a concealed chest. A trapper, who was his only attendant in his last
moments, dug over the ground floor of the hut and found a box containing
a jewelled sword, costly trinkets, and letters that bore out the
presumption of Follingsby's aristocratic origin. What became of these
valuables after their exhumation is not known, and the existence of more
has been suspected.
Coney Island is declared to have been used by a band of pirates as the
first national sand bank, and, as these rascals were caught and swung off
with short shrift, they do say that the plunder is still to be had--by
the man who finds it. But the hotel-keepers and three-card-monte men are
not waiting for that discovery to grow rich.
In Shandaken Valley, in the Catskills, it was affirmed that a party of
British officers buried money somewhere, when they were beset by the
farmers and hunters of that region, and never got it out of the earth
again.
On Tea Island, Lake George, the buried treasures of Lord Abercrombie have
remained suc
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