y can turn fractions into whole numbers. No;
I'm not to be compared to gentlemen. My property's my respectability. I
said that at the beginning, and I say it now. But, I'll tell you what,
brother William John, it's an emotion when you've got bags of thousands
of pounds in your arms."

Ordinarily, the farmer was a sensible man, as straight on the level of
dull intelligence as other men; but so credulous was he in regard to the
riches possessed by his wife's brother, that a very little tempted
him to childish exaggeration of the probable amount. Now that Anthony
himself furnished the incitement, he was quite lifted from the earth.
He had, besides, taken more of the strong mixture than he was ever
accustomed to take in the middle of the day; and as it seemed to him
that Anthony was really about to be seduced into a particular statement
of the extent of the property which formed his respectability (as
Anthony had chosen to put it), he got up a little game in his head
by guessing how much the amount might positively be, so that he could
subsequently compare his shrewd reckoning with the avowed fact. He tamed
his wild ideas as much as possible; thought over what his wife used to
say of Anthony's saving ways from boyhood, thought of the dark hints of
the Funds, of many bold strokes for money made by sagacious persons; of
Anthony's close style of living, and of the lives of celebrated misers;
this done, he resolved to make a sure guess, and therefore aimed below
the mark.

Money, when the imagination deals with it thus, has no substantial
relation to mortal affairs. It is a tricksy thing, distending and
contracting as it dances in the mind, like sunlight on the ceiling cast
from a morning tea-cup, if a forced simile will aid the conception. The
farmer struck on thirty thousand and some odd hundred pounds--outlying
debts, or so, excluded--as what Anthony's will, in all likelihood, would
be sworn under: say, thirty thousand, or, safer, say, twenty thousand.
Bequeathed--how? To him and to his children. But to the children in
reversion after his decease? Or how? In any case, they might make
capital marriages; and the farm estate should go to whichever of the two
young husbands he liked the best. Farmer Fleming asked not for any life
of ease and splendour, though thirty thousand pounds was a fortune; or
even twenty thousand. Noblemen have stooped to marry heiresses owning
no more than that! The idea of their having done so actually