ound that he had all along been the richer man of the two!

Anthony's comfort was in the unfaltering strength of his constitution.
He permitted his estimate of it to hint at the probability of his
outlasting his brother William John, to whom he wished no earthly ill,
but only that he should not live with a mitigated veneration for him. He
was really nourished by the farmer's gluttonous delight in his supposed
piles of wealth. Sometimes, for weeks, he had the gift of thinking
himself one of the Bank with which he had been so long connected; and
afterward a wretched reaction set in.

It was then that his touch upon Bank money began to intoxicate him
strangely. He had at times thousands hugged against his bosom, and his
heart swelled to the money-bags immense. He was a dispirited, but a
grateful creature, after he had delivered them up. The delirium came by
fits, as if a devil lurked to surprise him.

"With this money," said the demon, "you might speculate, and in two days
make ten times the amount."

To which Anthony answered: "My character's worth fifty times the
amount."

Such was his reply, but he did not think it. He was honest, and his
honesty had become a habit; but the money was the only thing which acted
on his imagination; his character had attained to no sacred halo, and
was just worth his annual income and the respect of the law for his
person. The money fired his brain!

"Ah! if it was mine!" he sighed. "If I could call it mine for just forty
or fifty hours! But it ain't, and I can't."

He fought dogged battles with the tempter, and beat him off again and
again. One day he made a truce with him by saying that if ever the
farmer should be in town of an afternoon he would steal ten minutes
or so, and make an appointment with him somewhere and show him the
money-bags without a word: let him weigh and eye them: and then the plan
was for Anthony to talk of politics, while the farmer's mind was in a
ferment.

With this arrangement the infernal Power appeared to be content, and
Anthony was temporarily relieved of his trouble. In other words, the
intermittent fever of a sort of harmless rascality was afflicting this
old creature. He never entertained the notion of running clear away with
the money entrusted to him.

Whither could an aged man fly? He thought of foreign places as of spots
that gave him a shivering sense of its being necessary for him to be
born again in nakedness and helplessness, if ever he