round which a constant fringe of salt is being deposited by this agent. Others again regard this as an insufficient cause, and advocate volcanic agency. Perhaps, looking to the immense series of ages geology so freely dispenses, the former account of the phenomenon might be thus reconciled with our experience of evaporation. Or, again, wider observation may give us more facts on volcanic saline eruptions, and so enable us satisfactorily to assign these deposits of rock-salt to plutonic agencies. Most likely the truth will be found equidistant between both theories. Both agencies may have been combined in different proportions, with all the other varied causes which have resulted in the present stratification of the earth.
Until the question is decisively set at rest, however, we will dismiss the subject with my Lord Dundreary’s remark, that this is. just one of those things which no fellow can find out.
G.
HOW OUR GRANDMOTHER STOPPED THE THIEF.
I am a very old lady. I have very often told my grandchildren the story of how I stopped the thief. And now they beg me to write it down, that they may read my story themselves. When I am dead, they mean. And so I write it.
When I was a little girl, I lived alone in an old country farm-house with my father. Your great grandmother died, as you have heard, when I was born, and so I was my father’s only companion. Dearly I loved him, and tenderly he talked to me of all his labours and all his pleasures. At the time I write of I was just eleven years old; a merry boisterous girl, with big fearless eyes, and a spirit of achievement that was always getting me into mischief. I could fill pages with my adventures, but I know you only now wish for one.
I must describe our house. It was built in the days of Dutch William, by some one who had learned to love the houses of Holland. The dwelling-house itself was nearly a cube: a great cube of dark red brick. The front door opened into a passage that pierced the block, and ended by another door which led into our farm-yard. There were two tall, narrow windows on either side of the principal door, and five tall, narrow windows on the first story. A heavy cornice hung over this row of windows, and from it rose the steep roof, covered with curly red tiles. This roof did not rise to a point. It was surmounted by a kind of summer house of wood, about seven or eight feet square, with a window in each of its four sides. This little chamber, which we called our lighthouse, was itself surmounted by a big shining vane. The interior of the lighthouse was reached through a small trap-door. This trap-door was in the ceiling of the great garret formed by the whole roof of the house. The garret could only be entered by one other trap-door, which opened into my father’s room. There was just space enough in the lighthouse for my father’s writing-table. There he kept his accounts, not without some straining of his brain, with scrupulous exactness. There he wrote his letters, on those rare occasions when necessity compelled him to do so. There were his samples of corn, his rusty pistols, and his dozen drawers of indescribable odds and ends. There he could see the half of his lands, and exercise a distant supervision over his men.
Four times a year my father paid the rent for his hired lands. The home-farm, as you know, was his own. On the day before the rent was to be taken to the landlord’s steward, the sum was always brought in gold from the bank at the town. Such a proceeding might not be very wise, but it was hallowed by its antiquity. The money was usually kept in a bag in my father’s own room. All these arrangements were well known to me. I shut my eyes now, and I see my father in his clean gaiters, and the neat bow that tied his hair; I see him ride off on his roan hack to pay his rent, and I know every crease in the little leathern bag that carries the gold.
All the tribe of house servants and labourers who lived on our farm knew my father’s ways as well as I did. But he was unsuspicious to a fault.
One Friday evening my father had ridden to the town, and had come back with his gold. All the maids and the men were sitting at their supper in our great kitchen, and I stood by the noisy fire waiting for my father to come down to them. He always came in to their meal, said a hearty word to those who were nearest to him, and then retired with me to his own parlour, his supper, and his pipe of peace.
On the particular evening in question, he walked into the room, swinging something in his hand. It was the leathern bag that carried the money; but it was empty. I knew that its place was in the bureau in my father’s room—not empty, but full.
“Father,” I said, “where’s the money? Why haven’t you locked it up in the bag?”
Everybody in the room heard my question, for there was always a hush when the master came among his men, and everybody in the room heard his answer:
“Where’s the money, missie? I mounted the lighthouse when I came in, to get the keys I left there in the morning, caught the bag in the corner of the table, and tumbled all the coin into the drawer. There it may lie. It’s safe enough.”
In an hour more, I had been dismissed with my usual kiss, and was shut close in my own room. I have said that I should describe the house. I have only partly done so. The great range of stables and farm-buildings, at the corner of which the actual house was built, were partly made out of the ruins of an old manor-house that had fallen into decay with a fallen family. The only part of the buildings that still showed any signs of architectural beauty was one gable end, where the stables abutted on the modern house. There stood still an old room on a third floor, with great mullioned windows, each in a gable of its own, that stood out from the old roof. Two of these large windows looked out to the west; and on the south side, which adjoined the modern house, was a smaller attic window, apparently inserted since the dismantling of the building, for instead of mullions, it contained a rough sash. The base of this little window (it was some five feet in height) was on the floor of the attic, and nearly level with the projecting cornice of the house. Between the cornice and the sill of the window was a
