The possession of that crock was the heaviest of cares.  Where on earth was he to hide it? how to keep it safely, secretly?  What if he were robbed of it in some sly way!  O, thought of utter wo! it made the fortunate possessor quiver like an aspen.  Or what, if some one or more of those blustering boon companions were to come by night with a bludgeon and a knife, and—­and cut his throat, and find the treasure? or, worse still, were to torture him, set him on the fire like a saucepan (he had heard of Turpin having done so with a rich old woman), and make him tell them “where” in his extremity of pains, and give up all, and then—­and then murder him at last, outright, and afterwards burn the hovel over his head, babes and all, that none might live to tell the tale?  These fears set him on the rack, and furnished one inciting cause to that uninterrupted orgie; he must be either mad or miserable, this lucky finder.

Also, even in his tipsy state, he could not cast off care:  he might in his cups reveal the dangerous secret of having found a crock of gold.  A secret still it was:  Grace, his wife, and himself, were the only souls who knew it.  Dear Grace feared to say a word about the business:  not in apprehension of the law, for she never thought of that too probable intrusion on the finder:  but simply because her unsophisticated piety believed that God, for some wise end, had allowed the Evil One to tempt her father; she, indeed, did not know the epigram,

  The devil now is wiser than of yore: 
  He tempts by making rich—­not making poor: 

but she did not conceive that notion in her mind; she contrasted the wealthy patriarch Job, tried by poverty and pain, but just and patient in adversity—­with the poor labourer Acton, tried by luxury and wealth, and proved to be apostate in prosperity:  so she held her tongue, and hitherto had been silent on a matter of so much local wonder as her father’s sudden wealth, in the midst of urgent curiosity and extraordinary rumours.

Mary was kept quiet as we know, by superstition of a lower grade, the dread of having money of the murdered, a thought she never breathed to any but her husband; and to poor uninitiated Grace (who had not heard a word of Ben’s adventure), her answer about Mrs. Quarles and Mr. Jennings in the dawn of the crock’s first blessing, had been entirely unintelligible:  Mary, then, said never a word, but looked on dreadingly to see the end.

As for Roger himself, he was too much in apprehension of a landlord’s claims, and of a task-master’s extortions, to breath a syllable about the business.  So he hid his crock as best he could—­we shall soon hear how and where—­took out sovereign after sovereign day by day, and made his flush of instant wealth a mystery, a miracle, a legacy, good luck, any thing, every thing but the truth:  and he would turn fiercely round to the frequent questioner with a “What’s that to you?—­Nobody’s business but mine:”  and then would coaxingly add the implied bribe to secresy, in his accustomed invitation—­“And now, what’ll you take?”—­a magical phrase, which could suffice to quell murmurs for the time, and postponed curiosity to appetite.  Thus the fact was still unknown, and weighed on Roger’s mind as a guilty concealment, an oppressive secret.  What if any found it out?