Aunt
Bridget for a crock to hide it in: mayn't one use a honey-pot, as Teddy
Rourke would say, barring the honey?"

"Ha! and so you hide the hoard up there, aunt, eh? along with the
preserves in a honey-pot, do you?"

"We'll see--we'll see, some o' these long days; not that the money's to
be yours, Nep--you're rich enough, and don't want it; there's your poor
sister Scott with her fourteen children, and Aunt Bridget must give her
a lift in life: she was a good niece to me, Simon, and never left my
side before she married: maybe she'll have cause to bless the dead."

Jennings hardly spoke a word more; but drained his glass in silence, got
up a sudden stomach-ache, and wished his aunt good-night.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SCHEMES.

WE must follow Simon Jennings to his room. He felt keenly
disappointed. Money was the idol of his heart, as it is of many million
others. He had robbed, lied, extorted, tyrannized; he had earned scorn,
ill-report, and hatred; nay, he had even diligently gone to work, and
lost his own self-love and self-respect in the service of his darling
idol. He was at once, for lucre's sake, the mean, cringing fawner, and
the pitiless, iron despot; to the rich he could play supple parasite,
while the poor man only knew him as an unrelenting persecutor; with the
good, and they were chiefly of the fairer, softer sex, he walked in
meekness, the spiritual hypocrite; the while, it was his boast to
over-reach the worst in low duplicity and crooked dealing. All this he
was for gold. When the eye of the world was on him, and intuition warned
him of the times, he was ever the serene, the correct, with a smooth
tongue and an oily smile; but in the privacy of some poor hovel, where
his debtor sued for indulgence, or some victim of his passions (he had
more depravities than one) threw her wretched self upon his pity, then
could Simon Jennings lash sternness into rage, and heat his brazen heart
with the embers of inveterate malice. It was as if the serpent, that
voluble, insinuating reptile, which had power to fascinate poor Eve,
turned to rend her when she had fallen, erect, with flashing eyes, and
bristling crest, with venomed fangs, and hissing. Behold,
snake-worshippers of Mexico, the prototype of your grim idol, in
Mammon's model slave and specimen disciple!

Such a man was Simon Jennings, a soul given up to gold--exclusively to
gold; for although, as we have hinted, and as hereafter may appear, he
could s