In the chapter headed "The find of the Heartless," I find a manuscript note perhaps worth printing here:
"If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (I wrote before the Australian gold discovery), even as the shrewd Defoe invented for his Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, where gold has not yet been found, though it may be. However, I did not originally make the splendid guess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his prognostic of that coldest January 7th. It may be true enough that, for my story's sake, I may wish I had thought of such a not unlikely find: for the uselessness of the mere metal to a positively starving man in the desert might have furnished comment analogous to what was uttered by Timon of Athens; and would have been picturesque enough and characteristic withal."
Here may follow a bit of notice for each tale from two critics of eminence,--as copied from one of my Archive-books, for memory is treacherous, and I must not invent. Of the "Crock of Gold" Mr. Ollier wrote as follows:--
"A story of extraordinary power, and, which is a still greater eulogy, of power devoted to a great and beneficent purpose. Mr. Martin Tupper (the author) is already known to the world by his 'Proverbial Philosophy,' and other works which indicate an extraordinarily gifted mind and an originality of conception and treatment rare indeed in these latter days,--but he has never demonstrated these qualities to such perfection as in his present deeply interesting work, wherein romance is united to wisdom, and both to practical utility. Terror is there in its sternest shape--the hateful lust of gold is shown in all its hideous deformity and inconceivable meanness, and through the awful suspense that hovers over the incidents, occasional gleams of pure and hallowed love come to humanise the darkness. This is cue of the few fictions constructed to stand the shocks of time."
And of the other tales we find the following from the pen of the celebrated Mr. St. John, when he was editor of the _Sunday Times_. He speaks of the three tales together:--