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 compartments was provided with a false floor about an inch from the top. This little space Ralph intended to fill with the micaceous earth so that he could open the box and allow anyone to inspect it and find it apparently filled with the earth.

Ralph was young and strong, but he found it a hard lift to place the box with the gold on the ass. This done, he tied the box firmly to the pack-saddle, put in his pouch the little lumps of gold he had found the day before, and started for the vessel. Altogether, it was the hardest day's work he ever did in his life.

In the three succeeding days he finished splitting the other two masses or heads and cutting them loose from the underlying mass, bringing home a piece with him each day. By weighing them in his room in the bark, he found that the six large pieces and the several smaller ones would aggregate a weight of more than one thousand pounds avoirdupois. This Ralph concluded was quite sufficient for that trip, and as it would require great labor to cut any more pieces from the underlying mass, he determined to let it alone. So at the end of the fourth day he put back into the hole the rock he had removed, spread the dirt over it, and