“Ay! ay!” said Robinson; “I see.”

“Michaelmas-day the old trees were staggering and the branches down to the ground with the crop; thirty shillings on every tree one with another; and so on for the next year, and the next; sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the year.  Trees were old and wanted a change.  His letting in the air to them, and turning the subsoil up to the frost and sun, had renewed their youth.  So by that he learned that tillage is the way to get treasure from the earth.  Men are ungrateful at times, but the soil is never ungrateful, it always makes a return for the pains we give it.”

“Well, George,” said Robinson, “thank you for your story; it is a very good one, and after it I’ll never dig for gold in a garden.  But now suppose a bare rock or an old river’s bed, or a mass of shingles or pipe-clay, would you dig or manure them for crops?”

“Why, of course not.”

“Well, those are the sort of places in which nature has planted a yellower crop and a richer crop than tillage ever produced.  And I believe there are plums of gold not thirty miles from here in such spots waiting only to be dug out.”

“Well, Tom, I have wasted a parable, that is all.  Good-night; I hope to sleep and be ready for a good day’s work to-morrow.  You shall dream of digging up gold here—­if you like.”

“I’ll never speak of it again,” said Robinson doggedly.

If you want to make a man a bad companion, interdict altogether the topic that happens to interest him.  Robinson ceased to vent his chimera.  So it swelled and swelled in his heart, and he became silent, absorbed, absent and out of spirits.  “Ah!” thought George, “poor fellow, he is very dull.  He won’t stay beside me much longer.”

This conviction was so strong that he hesitated to close with an advantageous offer that came to him from his friend, Mr. Winchester.  That gentleman had taken a lease of a fine run some thirty miles from George.  He had written George that he was to go and look at it, and if he liked it better than his own he was to take it.  Mr. Winchester could make no considerable use of either for some time to come.

George hesitated.  He felt himself so weak-handed with only Robinson, who might leave him, and a shepherd lad he had just hired.  However his hands were unexpectedly strengthened.

One day as the two friends were washing a sheep an armed savage suddenly stood before them.  Robinson dropped the sheep and stood on his defense, but George cried out, “No! no! it is Jacky!  Why, Jacky, where on earth have you been?” And he came warmly toward him.  Jacky fled to a small eminence and made warlike preparations.  “You stop you a good while and I speak.  Who you?”

“Who am I? stupid.  Why, who should I be but George Fielding?”

“I see you one George Fielding, but I not know you dis George Fielding.  George die.  I see him die.  You alive.  You please you call dog Carlo!  Carlo wise dog.”