e idea that they have got together, bit by bit, a
power, travels slowly up to their heavy brains. Once let it be grasped,
however, and they clutch a god. They feed on everybody's hunger for it.
And, let us confess, they have in that a mighty feast.

Anthony Hackbut was not a miser. He was merely a saving old man. His
vanity was, to be thought a miser, envied as a miser. He lived in daily
hearing of the sweet chink of gold, and loved the sound, but with a
poetical love, rather than with the sordid desire to amass gold pieces.
Though a saving old man, he had his comforts; and if they haunted him
and reproached him subsequently, for indulging wayward appetites for
herrings and whelks and other sea-dainties that render up no account to
you when they have disappeared, he put by copper and silver continually,
weekly and monthly, and was master of a sum.

He knew the breadth of this sum with accuracy, and what it would expand
to this day come a year, and probably this day come five years. He knew
it only too well. The sum took no grand leaps. It increased, but did not
seem to multiply. And he was breathing in the heart of the place, of all
places in the world, where money did multiply.

He was the possessor of twelve hundred pounds, solid, and in haven; that
is, the greater part in the Bank of England, and a portion in Boyne's
Bank. He had besides a few skirmishing securities, and some such bits of
paper as Algernon had given him in the public-house on that remarkable
night of his visit to the theatre.

These, when the borrowers were defaulters in their payments and pleaded
for an extension of time, inspired him with sentiments of grandeur that
the solid property could not impart. Nevertheless, the anti-poetical
tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing
whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of
satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming's conception of his
wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his
own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears
of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man's impotence to
suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it
would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!

What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony's
estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne's Farm?--when, in point of
fact, he f