But one thing remains to be told, and that is concerned with seven years after.

Among the effects of my friend, at that time just deceased, was found, carefully preserved, a gilt statuette representing Mercury, labelled 'Debased Roman.' No record was attached to explain how it came into his possession.

The figure was bequeathed to the Casterbridge Museum.
Detroit Post, March 1885.
WHAT THE SHEPHERD SAW: A TALE OF FOUR MOONLIGHT NIGHTS The genial Justice of the Peace--now, alas, no more--who made himself responsible for the facts of this story, used to begin in the good old- fashioned way with a bright moonlight night and a mysterious figure, an excellent stroke for an opening, even to this day, if well followed up.
The Christmas moon (he would say) was showing her cold face to the upland, the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as only to be discernible by an eye near at hand.

This eye, he said, was the eye of a shepherd lad, young for his occupation, who stood within a wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the early lambing season, and was abstractedly looking through the loophole at the scene without.
The spot was called Lambing Corner, and it was a sheltered portion of that wide expanse of rough pastureland known as the Marlbury Downs, which you directly traverse when following the turnpike-road across Mid-Wessex from London, through Aldbrickham, in the direction of Bath and Bristol.
Here, where the hut stood, the land was high and dry, open, except to the north, and commanding an undulating view for miles.

On the north side grew a tall belt of coarse furze, with enormous stalks, a clump of the same standing detached in front of the general mass.