as bruised and bleeding.

They all turned to go, but they had not gone twenty yards before there
was a crash and a loud report like thunder, and a slow rumbling,
rattling noise very dreadful to hear.

'Get out of this quick, sir,' said the gardener; 'the roof's fell in;
this part of the caves ain't safe.'

Edward was very feverish and ill for several days, during which he told
his father the whole story--of which his father did not believe a word.
But he was kind to Gustus, because Gustus was evidently fond of Edward.

When Edward was well enough to walk in the garden his father and he
found that a good deal of the shrubbery had sunk, so that the trees
looked as though they were growing in a pit.

It spoiled the look of the garden, and Edward's father decided to move
the trees to the other side.

When this was done the first tree uprooted showed a dark hollow below
it. The man is not born who will not examine and explore a dark hollow
in his own grounds. So Edward's father explored.

This is the true story of the discovery of that extraordinary vein of
silver, copper, and gold which has excited so much interest in
scientific and mining circles. Learned papers have been written about
it, learned professors have been rude to each other about it, but no one
knows how it came there except Gustus and Edward and you and me.
Edward's father is quite as ignorant as any one else, but he is much
richer than most of them; and, at any rate, he knows that it was Gustus
who first told him of the gold-mine, and who risked being
lagged--arrested by the police, that is--rather than let Edward wait
till morning with his hand fast between wood and rock.

So Edward and Gustus have been to a good school, and now they are at
Winchester, and presently they will be at Oxford. And when Gustus is
twenty-one he will have half the money that came from the gold-mine. And
then he and Edward mean to start a school of their own. And the boys who
are to go to it are to be the sort of boys who go to the summer camp of
the Grand Redoubt near the sea--the kind of boy that Gustus was.

So the spy-glass will do some good after all, though it _was_ so
unmanageable to begin with.

Perhaps it may even be found again. But I rather hope it won't. It
might, really, have done much more mischief than it did--and if any one
found it, it might do more yet.

There is no moral to this story, except.... But no--there is no moral.

[Illustration: Quen