“Precisely.  This mistake made a difference of about two inches and a half in the ’shot’—­that is to say, in the position of the peg nearest the tree; and had the treasure been beneath the ‘shot’ the error would have been of little moment; but the ‘shot,’ together with the nearest point of the tree, were merely two points for the establishment of a line of direction; of course the error, however trivial in the beginning, increased as we proceeded with the line, and, by the time we had gone fifty feet, threw us quite off the scent.  But for my deep-seated convictions that treasure was here somewhere actually buried, we might have had all our labor in vain.”

“I presume the fancy of the skull—­of letting fall a bullet through the skull’s eye—­was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag.  No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through this ominous insignium.”

“Perhaps so; still, I cannot help thinking that common-sense had quite as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency.  To be visible from the Devil’s seat, it was necessary that the object, if small, should be white; and there is nothing like your human skull for retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all vicissitudes of weather.”

“But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle—­how excessively odd!  I was sure you were mad.  And why did you insist on letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?”

“Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification.  For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree.  An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea.”

“Yes, I perceive; and now there is only one point which puzzles me.  What are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?”

“That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself.  There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them—­and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply.  It is clear that Kidd—­if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not—­it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor.  But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret.  Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen—­who shall tell?”

V. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843)

BY CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

[Setting.  In this most famous of Christmas stories Dickens gives us the very atmosphere of the season with all the contrasts that poverty and wealth, miserliness and charity, the past and the future can suggest.  Though he had London in mind, any great industrial center would have served as well, for Dickens was thinking primarily of the relations between employer and employee.  That Christmas is better kept in England now than when Dickens wrote is a triumph due more to “A Christmas Carol” than to any other one piece of prose or verse.