the buried treasure still _remaining_ entombed. Had Kidd concealed his
plunder for a time, and afterwards reclaimed it, the rumors would
scarcely have reached us in their present unvarying form. You will
observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about
money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his money, there the affair
would have dropped. It seemed to me that some accident--say the loss of
a memorandum indicating its locality--had deprived him of the means of
recovering it, and that this accident had become known to his followers,
who otherwise might never have heard that treasure had been concealed at
all, and who, busying themselves in vain, because unguided, attempts to
regain it, had given first birth, and then universal currency, to the
reports which are now so common. Have you ever heard of any important
treasure being unearthed along the coast?"

"Never."

"But that Kidd's accumulations were immense is well known. I took it for
granted, therefore, that the earth still held them; and you will
scarcely be surprised when I tell you that I felt a hope, nearly
amounting to certainty, that the parchment so strangely found involved a
lost record of the place of deposit."

"But how did you proceed?"

"I held the vellum again to the fire, after increasing the heat, but
nothing appeared. I now thought it possible that the coating of dirt
might have something to do with the failure; so I carefully rinsed the
parchment by pouring warm water over it, and, having done this, I placed
it in a tin pan, with the skull downwards, and put the pan upon a
furnace of lighted charcoal. In a few minutes, the pan having become