rs will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired
into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle
in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost
impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a
white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost
him nothing for keep, unless you count the tremor of soul and nerve,
which is surely worth something, in which a man criminally possessed of
another's property is almost certain to live.

Mr. Barter, then, had eight thousand pounds in ready money, was liable,
if discovered, to penal servitude, and was unable to touch a farthing
of his ill-got gains. There are many men in the world, the world's
experience proves it hourly, who set so small a price upon their
self-respect, that they will sell it for a shilling, for a drink, for
a word. But there is hardly any man so lost to the natural human desire
for self-approval that he will actually give away his self-respect for
nothing. Now this absurd transaction young Mr. Barter, when he took time
to think about things, appeared to himself to have made.

He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to
pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and
lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either
that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old
nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed
of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found
that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a
transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment
when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest
use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered,
and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no
possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them
jingle and glitter again as only one's own ready money can jingle and
glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were
to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands
of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute
itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was
neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew
to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he