TOM TIDDLER’S GROUND

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 62, 6 December 1930, Page 24

TOM TIDDLER’S GROUND

Little Pierre was playing happily in the sand and gravel while his father read the paper.

They had come out from Paris for a picnic in the Bois do Boulogne, and had found a shady path among the autumn trees far from passing motorcars.

It was a splendid place for making sand-pies, especially as the rabbits had been there before .Pierre and had mined the ground for him. He thrust bls own small paw down one of the holes to scoop out a bigger handful of sand. When he withdrew it there was something bright and glittering among the sand.

He held it up to his fingers and called out to his father. Father looked up from his newspaper and came over to Pierre’s side to look. The shining thing was a gold coin. •. It was in fact a golden louis of the date of Louis the Sixteenth, the unhappy king of France who, together with Marie Antoinette, went to the guillotine. ® Pierre and his'father dug further In the sand. One gold coin after another was found till there were 73 of them. How they had come there? Who can tell? They may have been burled by some faithful servant of one of the proscribed aristocrats of that time. They may have been stolen. All sorts of romances could be built about the gold hoard found by the little Paris boy.

But the reality was more golden than romance to Pierre and to his father, who is a hard-working railway man. The coins were taken by them to the Prefecture and given up to the police; but as their owner must have been dead more than a century, and there was no one else to claim them, Pierre is to have them as a fairy’s gift to start him in life.