This storm, like the first, is of the nature of a squall, and it ends as abruptly as the other.  We dig no further.  My friend says that it is enough—­he has proved his point.  He turns to replace the bones in the trench and covers them.  But they fall to pieces under his touch:  the air has disintegrated them, and he can only sweep in the fragments.  The next act of his plan is more than difficult, but is carried out.  The treasures are inhumed again in their respective holes:  they are not ours.  Each deposition seems to cost him a twinge; and at one moment I fancied I saw him slip his hand into his coat pocket.

‘We must re-bury them all,’ say I.

‘O yes,’ he answers with integrity.  ‘I was wiping my hand.’

The beauties of the tesselated floor of the governor’s house are once again consigned to darkness; the trench is filled up; the sod laid smoothly down; he wipes the perspiration from his forehead with the same handkerchief he had used to mop the skeleton and tesserae clean; and we make for the eastern gate of the fortress.

Dawn bursts upon us suddenly as we reach the opening.  It comes by the lifting and thinning of the clouds that way till we are bathed in a pink light.  The direction of his homeward journey is not the same as mine, and we part under the outer slope.

Walking along quickly to restore warmth I muse upon my eccentric friend, and cannot help asking myself this question:  Did he really replace the gilded image of the god Mercurius with the rest of the treasures?  He seemed to do so; and yet I could not testify to the fact.  Probably, however, he was as good as his word.

* * *

It was thus I spoke to myself, and so the adventure ended.  But one thing remains to be told, and that is concerned with seven years after.  Among the effects of my friend, at that time just deceased, was found, carefully preserved, a gilt statuette representing Mercury, labelled ‘Debased Roman.’  No record was attached to explain how it came into his possession.  The figure was bequeathed to the Casterbridge Museum.

Detroit Post,

March 1885.

WHAT THE SHEPHERD SAW:  A TALE OF FOUR MOONLIGHT NIGHTS

The genial Justice of the Peace—­now, alas, no more—­who made himself responsible for the facts of this story, used to begin in the good old-fashioned way with a bright moonlight night and a mysterious figure, an excellent stroke for an opening, even to this day, if well followed up.

The Christmas moon (he would say) was showing her cold face to the upland, the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as only to be discernible by an eye near at hand.  This eye, he said, was the eye of a shepherd lad, young for his occupation, who stood within a wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the early lambing season, and was abstractedly looking through the loophole at the scene without.