hich the golden deity
acquires his authority; nor do we need to have recourse to the conceit
of the old writer who tells us that the reason why gold has such an
influence upon man, lies in the fact that it is of the colour of the
sun, which is the fountain of light, and life, and joy. Certain it is,
at least, that Halket having been taken into the counting-house on a
raised salary, began "to lay by," as the Scotch call it; and by-and-by,
with the help of a little money lent to him by his master, he began by
purchasing produce from the neighbouring plantations, and selling it
where he might,--all which he did with advantage, yet with the ordinary
result to a Scotsman, that while he turned to so good account the king's
head, the king's head began to turn his own.

And now in place of months we must begin to count by lustrums; and the
first five years, even with all the thoughts of his dead, or, at least,
lost Mary, proved in Halket's case the truth of the book written by a
Frenchman, to prove that man is a plant; for he had already thrown out
from his head or heart so many roots in the Virginian soil that he was
bidding fair to be as firmly fixed in his new sphere as a magnolia, and
if that bore golden blossoms, so did he; yet, true to his first love,
there was not among all these flowers one so fair as the fair-haired
Mary. Nay, with all hope not yet extinguished, he had even at the end of
the period resolved upon a visit to Scotland, when, strangely enough,
and sadly too, he was told by Mr. Dreghorn, that having had occasion to
hear from Mr. Peter Ramsay on the subject of some more horse-dealings,
that person had reported to him that Mary Brown, the lover of his old
stable-boy, was dead. A communication this which, if it had been made at
an earlier period, would have prostrated Halket altogether, but it was
softened by his long foreign anticipations, and he was thereby the more
easily inclined to resign his saddened soul to the further dominion of
the said god, Mammon; for, as to the notion of putting any of those
beautiful half-castes he sometimes saw about the planter's house at
Peach Grove, in the place of her of the golden ringlets, it was nothing
better than the desecration of a holy temple. Then the power of the god
increased with the offerings, one of which was his large salary as
manager, a station to which he was elevated shortly after he had
received the doleful tidings of Mary's death. Another lustrum is added