tenant, but ye'll have to quit," quoth Davie, tugging
away manfully at the offender.

It obstinately refused to yield, and, laying open the earth with his
spade, he discovered that it had twined itself again and again round
some object which he at first supposed to be a stone. A closer
examination, however, showed that it was not a stone, but _a rusty iron
box_!

Then the dying words of Hugh Cameron rushed to Davie's mind, and he had
no difficulty in completing the sentence which death had cut short,
"Under the Rowan tree in--_the garden_!"

That it had stood there--the only tree of its kind--in the days of the
rebellion, was afterwards shown by consulting an old plan of the
estate.

Davie's first impulse was to summon a witness to the spot, but
remembering that the laird had gone to Edinburgh for a few days, he
changed his mind, and decided to impart the secret to no one till he
came back. To leave the box where it was, or anywhere else on the
premises, would be the same thing as to proclaim his discovery, as the
servants would be sure to find it; so he concluded to take it home and
conceal it in his own barn.

Now Davie was an honest man--at least he had always supposed himself to
be--and if you, or I, or another, had insinuated aught to the contrary,
he would have been highly indignant. And yet it is a fact that as he
went out of the garden with the chest on his wheelbarrow along with the
garden tools, the whole carefully concealed with oat straw, he felt
like a thief!

Meeting some of his cronies, with whom at ordinary times he would have
held a _jolly crack_, he now hurried by with a mere "Gude-e'en,
neebor," and when he saw the minister coming that way he crossed the
road rather than speak to the godly man.

As he turned into the lane which led to his own cottage, little Jamie,
who had been on the watch for him, came running out to beg for a ride
on the wheelbarrow; and instead of catching him in his arms for a kiss,
as was his wont, he angrily bade him "gang hame to his mither."

The disappointed child looked up in his father's face, and then,
without saying a word, but sobbing bitterly, trotted back to the house.

There was in the barn a closet where Davie kept his garden tools, and
which was seldom entered by any one save himself. There he deposited
the chest, which had already begun to exercise a baleful influence, and
which was destined to work him still further woe.

He had intended--or he had