And here, at this point, his question calls for some explanation. 

 One day, some twelve months or so earlier than the incident just described, we of the mill being all collected together for dinner and my father just coming out of one of his drunken fits, a coin tinkled on the floor and rolled into the empty fireplace, where it lay shining yellow. My father, who had somehow jerked it out of his pocket from the trembling of his hand, walked unsteadily across the room and stood looking down upon it vacantly. There he remained for a minute or two, we watching him, and from time to time shot a stealthy glance round at one or other of us. Twice or thrice he made as if to pick it up, but his heart apparently failed him, for he desisted. Suddenly, however, he had it in his hand and stood fingering it, still watchful of us. 

 “Well,” he said at last, “there it is for all the world to see,” and placed it on the mantelpiece. Then he turned round to us expectant. 

 “That coin,” he said, slowly, “was given me by a man who dug it up in his garden hereabouts when he was forking potatoes. It’s ancient and a curiosity. There it remains for ornament.” 

 Now whether this was only some caprice of the moment or that he dreaded that had he then and there pouched it some boyish spirit of curiosity might tempt one or other of us to turn out his pockets in search of the treasure when he was in one of his liquorish trances, and so make further discoveries, we could never know. Anyhow, on the mantelpiece the coin lay for some weeks; a contemptible little disk to view, with an odd figure of an ill-formed mannikin stamped on one side of it, and no one of us offered to touch it, until one day Dr. Crackenthorpe paid us a visit. 

 This worthy had only recently come to Winton, tempted hither, I think, more by lure of antiquities than by any set determination to establish a practice in the town. Indeed, in the result, as I have heard, his fees for any given year would never have quarter filled a wineglass unless paid in pence. He had a small private income and two weaknesses—one a craze for coin collecting, the other a feverish palate, which brought him acquainted with my father, in this wise—that he encountered the old man one night when the latter was complacently swerving into the Itchen at a point known as “The Weirs,” where the water is deep, and conducted him graciously home. The next day he called, and, it becoming apparent that fees were not his object, a rough, queer acquaintance was struck up between the two men, which brought the doctor 

 Prev. P 10/311 next