em so well advanced in their learning,
that I was amazed at it: they repeating a whole ode without book out of
Horace, and did give me a very good account of any thing almost, and did
make me very readily very good Latin, and did give me good account of
their Greek grammar, beyond all possible expectation; and so grave and
manly as I never saw, I confess, nor could have believed; so that they
will be fit to go to Cambridge in two years at most. They are both
little, but very like one another, and well-looked children. Then in to
my Lady again, and staid till it was almost night again, and then took
leave for a great while again, but with extraordinary kindness from
my Lady, who looks upon me like one of her own family and interest. So
thence, my wife and people by the highway, and I walked over the park
with Mr. Shepley, and through the grove, which is mighty pretty, as is
imaginable, and so over their drawbridge to Nun's Bridge, and so to my
father's, and there sat and drank, and talked a little, and then parted.
And he being gone, and what company there was, my father and I, with
a dark lantern; it being now night, into the garden with my wife, and
there went about our great work to dig up my gold. But, Lord! what a
tosse I was for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it
was; that I begun heartily to sweat, and be angry, that they should not
agree better upon the place, and at last to fear that it was gone but by
and by poking with a spit, we found it, and then begun with a spudd to
lift up the ground. But, good God! to see how sillily they did it, not
half a foot under ground, and in the sight of the world from a hundred
places, if any body by accident were near hand, and within sight of
a neighbour's window, and their hearing also, being close by: only my
father says that he saw them all gone to church before he begun the
work, when he laid the money, but that do not excuse it to me. But I was
out of my wits almost, and the more from that, upon my lifting up the
earth with the spudd, I did discern that I had scattered the pieces of
gold round about the ground among the grass and loose earth; and taking
up the iron head-pieces wherein they were put, I perceive the earth was
got among the gold, and wet, so that the bags were all rotten, and all
the notes, that I could not tell what in the world to say to it, not
knowing how to judge what was wanting, or what had been lost by Gibson
in his coming down: whi