m the house. To combat with evil in his own country village had seemed
a simple thing enough, but it appeared a superhuman task in giant London.

CHAPTER XXV

It requires, happily, many years of an ordinary man's life to teach him
to believe in the exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy:
yet, when ingenuous minds have fully comprehended the potent character of
the metal, they are likely enough to suppose that it will buy everything:
after which comes the groaning anxiety to possess it.

This stage of experience is a sublime development in the great souls of
misers. It is their awakening moment, and it is their first real sense of
a harvest being in their hands. They have begun under the influence of
the passion for hoarding, which is but a blind passion of the
finger-ends. The 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