阅读理解
Treasure hunts have excited people's
imagination for hundreds of years both in real life and in books such as Robert
Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Kit Williams, a modern writer, had the idea
of combining the real excitement of a treasure hunt with clues found in a book
when he wrote a children's story, Masquerade, in 1979. The book was about a
hare, and a month before it came out Williams buried(埋) a gold hare in a park in Bedfordshire. The book contained a large
number of clues to help readers find the hare, but Williams put in a lot of
"red herrings", or false clues, to mislead them.
Ken Roberts, the man who found the hare,
had been looking for it for nearly two years. Although he had been searching in
the wrong area most of the time, he found it by logic(逻辑), not by luck. His success came from the fact that he had gained an
important clue at the start. He had realized that the words: "One of Six
to Eight" under the first picture in the book connected the hare in some
way to Katherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VⅢ's six
wives. Even here, however, Williams had succeeded in miss leading him. Ken knew
that Katherine of Aragon had died at Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire in 1536 and
thought that Williams had buried the hare there. He had been digging there for
over a year before a new idea came to him. He found out that Kit Williams had
spent his childhood near Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, and thought that he must
have buried the hare in a place he knew well, but he still could not see the
connection with Katherine of Aragon, until one day he saw two stone crosses in
Ampthill Park and learnt that they had been build in her honor in 1773.
Even then his search had not come to an
end. It was only after he had spent several nights digging around the cross
that be decided to write to Kit Williams to find out if he was wasting his time
there. Williams encouraged him to continue, and on February 24th 1982, he found
the treasure. It was worth £3000 in the beginning, but the excitement it had
caused since its burial made it much more valuable.