of grandeur that
the solid property could not impart. Nevertheless, the anti-poetical
tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing
whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of
satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming's conception of his
wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his
own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears
of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man's impotence to
suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it
would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!

What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony's
estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne's Farm?--when, in point of fact,
he found 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 tha