malignity the lower nature
ever feels towards the higher. I consulted my aunt Fan.

"If somebody gave you half-a-crown," I put it to her, "what would you
buy with it?"

"Side-combs," said my aunt; she was always losing or breaking her
side-combs.

"But I mean if you were me," I explained.

"Drat the child!" said my aunt; "how do I know what he wants if he don't
know himself. Idiot!"

The shop windows into which I stared, my nose glued to the pane! The
things I asked the price of! The things I made up my mind to buy and
then decided that I wouldn't buy! Even my patient mother began to show
signs of irritation. It was rapidly assuming the dimensions of a family
curse, was old Hasluck's half-crown.

Then one day I made up my mind, and so ended the trouble. In the window
of a small plumber's shop in a back street near, stood on view among
brass taps, rolls of lead piping and cistern requisites, various squares
of coloured glass, the sort of thing chiefly used, I believe, for
lavatory doors and staircase windows. Some had stars in the centre,
and others, more elaborate, were enriched with designs, severe but
inoffensive. I purchased a dozen of these, the plumber, an affable
man who appeared glad to see me, throwing in two extra out of sheer
generosity.

Why I bought them I did not know at the time, and I do not know now.
My mother cried when she saw them. My father could get no further than:
"But what are you going to do with them?" to which I was unable to
reply. My aunt, alone, attempted comfort.

"If a person fancies coloured glass," said my aunt, "then he's a fool
not to buy coloured glass when he gets the chance. We haven't all the
same tastes."

In the end, I cut myself badly with them and consented to their being
thrown into the dust-bin. But looking back, I have come to regard myself
rather as the victim of Fate than of Folly. Many folks have I met since,
recipients of Hasluck's half-crowns--many a man who has slapped his
pocket and blessed the day he first met that "Napoleon of Finance,"
as later he came to be known among his friends--but it ever ended so;
coloured glass and cut fingers. Is it fairy gold that he and his kind
fling round? It would seem to be.

Next time old Hasluck knocked at our front door a maid in cap and apron
opened it to him, and this was but the beginning of change. New oilcloth
glistened in the passage. Lace curtains, such as in that neighbourhood
were the hall-mark of the pluto