in possession of a document, which he is prepared to
deposit with the lender--a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to
remove any feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could
experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which
develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable
possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled
bit of paper, and spreads it out--a fifty-pound bank-note! The friend,
who knew him well, was of opinion that, had he, on delivering over the
seven shillings and sixpence, received the bank-note, he never would
have heard anything more of the transaction from the other party. It was
also his opinion that, before coming to a personal friend, the owner of
the note had made several efforts to raise money on it among persons who
might take a purely business view of such transactions; but the lateness
of the hour, and something in the appearance of the thing altogether,
had induced these mercenaries to forget their cunning, and decline the
transaction.

He stretched till it broke the proverb that to give quickly is as good
as to give twice. His giving was quick enough on the rare occasions when
he had wherewithal to give, but then the act was final, and could not
be repeated. If he suffered in his own person from this peculiarity, he
suffered still more in his sympathies, for he was full of them to all
breathing creatures, and, like poor Goldy, it was agony to him to hear
the beggar's cry of distress, and to hear it without the means of
assuaging it, though in a departed fifty pounds there were doubtless the
elements for appeasing many a street wail. All sums of money were
measured by him through the common standard of immediate use; and with
more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note, might he
inform you that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto
been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be nearest to him at the
time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in
negotiating a loan of "twopence." He was and is a great authority in
political economy. I have known great anatomists and physiologists as
careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred
that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truth of political
economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence, and
that something more than a knowledge of the received principles of
physiology