so he died, and the eyes of the rich man were closed.

He died full of years, and perhaps in one, and that the most usual
acceptation of the word, full of honour. He owed no man a shilling,
had been true to all his engagements, had been kind to his relatives
with a rough kindness: he had loved honesty and industry, and had
hated falsehood and fraud: to him the herd, born only to consume the
fruits, had ever been odious; that he could be generous, his conduct
in his nephew's earliest years had plainly shown: he had carried,
too, in his bosom a heart not altogether hardened against his kind,
for he had loved his nephew, and, to a certain extent, his niece
also, and his granddaughter.

But in spite of all this, he had been a bad man. He had opened his
heart to that which should never find admittance to the heart of man.
The iron of his wealth had entered into his very soul. He had made
half a million of money, and that half-million had been his god--his
only god--and, indeed, men have but one god. The true worship of the
one loved shrine prevents all other worship. The records of his money
had been his deity. There, in his solitude at Hadley, he had sat
and counted them as they grew, mortgages and bonds, deeds and scrip,
shares in this and shares in that, thousands in these funds and
tens of thousands in those. To the last, he had gone on buying and
selling, buying in the cheap market and selling in the dear; and
everything had gone well with him.

Everything had gone well with him! Such was the City report of old
Mr. Bertram. But let the reader say how much, or rather how little,
had gone well. Faustus-like, he had sold himself to a golden
Mephistopheles, and his Margaret had turned to stone within his
embrace.

How many of us make Faust's bargain! The bodily attendance of the
devil may be mythical; but in the spirit he is always with us. And
how rarely have we the power to break the contract! The London
merchant had so sold himself. He had given himself body and soul to a
devil. The devil had promised him wealth, and had kept his word. And
now the end had come, though the day of his happiness had not yet
arrived.

But the end had not come. All this was but the beginning. If we
may believe that a future life is to be fitted to the desires and
appetites as they are engendered here, what shall we think of the
future of a man whose desire has been simply for riches, whose
appetite has been for heaps of money? How mise