doing.

But to my tale, which is to me more absorbing than _Rob Roy, Robinson
Crusoe_ and _Boots at the Swan_ combined. Of all our visitors I
preferred Uncle Nathan Stene. Not that I liked him personally. He was
the typical rich man: I should know he was rich wherever I met him.
There are thousands like him: they despise me utterly. Uncle Nathan had
a scorn for poor people. He disdained whole States that gave him a bad
market, and regarded young fellows who smoke and go to the theatre as
beggars' dogs. He was of middle height, with reddish complexion, sandy
hair and eyebrows, quick, sharp gray eyes, and features of a short,
clean, close aquiline cut, with thin, dry lips--a man of iron, pig
iron. When young he might have been facetious, but he had concentrated
his energies entirely on money, till there was nothing left to go in
other directions, and his humor was now as sombre as the grin of a
hanged man. He had self-conceit, which is a talent when combined with
some other qualities. Doctor Johnson's observation, that to make money
requires talents, is true: a dull man cannot do it. Uncle Nate had to
remember thirty thousand articles in his business of wholesale
druggist. He was a perfect devil-fish for sucking the goodness from
every business he was concerned in--banking, railroading, and so on. He
belonged to the Chicago Board of Trade, and was particularly useful in
getting those fellows in Indianapolis on a string, sending the wheat
up, up, until the Hoosiers had made a few hundred thousands, and then,
when they thought they were going to make millions, letting it down and
scooping them. My habit of listening intently to Uncle Nate's
telegrammatic style of talk caused him to like me. I resembled King
Lear: I talked with those who were wise, and said little, and Nathan's
aphorisms about trade and politics made good paragraphs when boiled
down to the crisp cracklins.

While I worked and Lydia entertained we were waltzing like the wind
down to ruin. No use to cry, "Ho! great gods! Hilloa! you're wanted
here!" On we went.

Worrying over pecuniary affairs gradually sapped my mind. To lose one's
eyes or all one's relations, or to be bitten by a mad dog, will not
unhinge the brain so completely as pecuniary anxiety. My paragraphs,
spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my
post on the _Times_. I became the collector on commission of certain
rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicag