“Poor old Lo!” ejaculated the lawyer, “whatever is that dog after?  Hi, Muggins, Muggins!”

But Muggins would not leave the earthwork into which he was digging with rapidly moving forepaws.  As Coristine remarked, it was a regular Forepaugh’s circus.  When the pedestrians came up to him, he had a large hole made in apparently fresh dug earth, and had uncovered a tin box, japanned above.  This the pair disinterred with their walking-sticks, amid great demonstrations from the terrier.  The lawyer opened it judicially, and found it to contain a lot of fragments of hard limestone, individually labelled.  Looking over these, his eye rested on one marked P.B.  Miss Du Plessis, lot 3, concession 2, township of Flanders.  Others were labelled T. Mulcahy, S. Storch, R. McIver, O. Fish, with their lots, concessions and townships, and the initials F.M. and P.

“What is the import of this?” asked the schoolmaster.

“Import or export, it’s the Grinstun man, the owner of this sagacious dog, that buried this box till he had time to bring a waggon for it.  These are samples of grindstone rock, and, if I am not a Dutchman, F means fair, M, middling, P, poor, and P.B., prime boss, and that is Miss Du Plessis.  Gad! we’ve got her now, Jewplesshy, Do Please, Do Please-us, are just Du Plessis.  It’s a pleasant sort of name, Wilks, my boy?”

“What are you going to do with this treasure trove, might I ask?” inquired the dominie.

“Bury it,” replied the lawyer.

“I trust you will make no unfair use of the information it contains, part of which was confided to me privately, and under seal of secrecy, by Mr. Rawdon?”

“Now, Wilks, howld your tongue about that.  I ask you no questions, you tell me no lies nor anything else.  If you think I’m going to see a girl cheated, just because she is a girl, you don’t know your friend.  But you do, you honest old Wilks, don’t you now?”

“Very well, only remember I breathed no hint of this in your ear.”

“All right, old man,” answered Miss Du Plessis’ self-constituted advocate, as he shovelled the earth in over the tin box.  “Muggins, you rascal, if you dig that up again, I’ll starve you to death.”

The pedestrians deserted the archaeological find, and trudged away into the north west.

“Wilks, my dear, I feel like the black crow,” said Coristine, as they journeyed along the pleasant highway.

“Like what?” asked the dominie, adjusting his eye-glass.

“Like the crow, don’t you know?

     Said one black crow unto his mate,
     What shall we do for grub to ate?

Faith, it’ll be an awful thing if we’re going to die of starvation in the wilderness.”

“I thought you were a botanist, Corry?”

“So I am, in a small way.”

“Then, what bushes are those in that beaver meadow?”

In another minute, the lawyer, closely followed by Muggins, was in the meadow, exclaiming “Vaccinium Canadense!  Come on, Wilks, and have a feast.”  Muggins was eating the berries with great satisfaction, and Coristine kept him company.  The dominie also partook of them, remarking:  “This is the whortleberry, or berry of the hart, vulgarly called the huckleberry, although huckle means a hump, which is most inappropriate.”