What Mr. Butler says in his preface, no doubt after speech with me, for I was his visitor at the time in 1851, is this:—­

“All who have had the good fortune to meet Mr. Tupper during his visit here have been struck with his characteristic impulsiveness.  In accordance with this feature of his mind, nearly all of his most successful performances have been occasioned by something altogether incidental and unpremeditated—­the result of an impulse accidentally—­shall we not say, providentially?—­imparted.  It was so with the first work in this series (four volumes) respecting the composition of which he has given to me in conversation the following account.  Some years ago he purchased a house at Brighton.  While laying out the garden, he had occasion to have several drains made.  One day observing a workman, Francis Suter, standing in one of the trenches wet and wearied with toil, Mr. Tupper said to him in a tone of pleasantry, ‘Wouldn’t you like to dig up there a crock full of gold?’—­’If I did,’ said the man, ’it would do me no good, because merely finding it would not make it mine.’—­’But suppose you could not only find such a treasure, but might honestly keep it, wouldn’t you think yourself lucky?’—­’Oh yes, sir, I suppose I should—­but,’ after a pause, ’but I am not so sure, sir, that it is the best thing that could happen to me.  I think, on the whole, I would rather have steady work and fair wages all the season than find a crock of gold.’

“Here was wisdom.  The remark of the honest trench-digger at once set in motion a train of thought in the mind of the author.  He entered his study, wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper these words, ’The Crock of Gold, a Tale of Covetousness,’ and in less than a week that remarkable story was written.  By the advice of his wife, however, he spent another week in rewriting it, and then gave it to the world in its finished state.”

In the same Butlerian volume occurs the following MS. notice written by me (in about 1853) respecting the origins of my two other tales, the three being issued together:—­

“As in the instance of my ‘Crock of Gold,’ both ‘The Twins’ and ‘Heart’ were undoubtedly the outcome in after years of early observations, anecdotes, and incidents, whereof memory kept in silence an experimental record.  Very few artists succeed in the delineation of life without living models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they rather get hints from than actually copy.  Thus though I sketched Roger Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage near Postford Pond as his home,—­adding thereto Mr. Campion’s park and house at Danney, near Hurst (I was then living at Brighton) as the model for Sir John Vincent’s estate,—­as well as Grace, Ben Burke, and so on from persons I had seen,—­I need not say that my sketches from nature were but outlines to my finished work of art.  Simon Jennings, however, is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton.  So also with these tales, and others of my writings.”