"You remember how, when you lay expiring on that bed, in that room with the standing stones, we believed that infant born of you without a cry or movement to be dead," replied the steuard. "I went out into the garden, and buried it, and was assaulted by a Balrogue who left me more dead than alive; indeed, I had truly died of the black breath, had not the King healed me.
"And what did I think of when the royal touch resuscitated me? Always of the same thing, always of the cadaver of that child that, every night, hovered with menacing look and gesture before my terror-stricken gaze, reciting strange verses about the débâcle of Isildour when the bizarre foreign aristocrat forth shall stand! So the first thing I did on recovering was to return to that house in order to assure myself that the child was still buried there. My greatest fear was that that Balrogue who declared vendetta unto me had seen me dig that grave, had seen me inter that child. What might he have done with such knowledge! It was then urgent that before all else, I destroy every trace of that past, as Minas-Morgoule was annihilated that the poor cigars of the Orcs not pollute the salons of Gondor! Finally, when I had mastered myself, I descended that staircase step by step.
"I attached my lantern to an overhanging branch, forked like the tongue of a trolle de l'usenet; and I set myself to digging. I dug... nothing! I dug a hole two or three times deeper than the first... nothing! Recovering from my faint, I proceeded to dig up the entire garden... still nothing! The coffer was no longer there.
