e-discovered; a
very ingenious proposition to turn London smoke into manure, by a new
chemical process; recommendations to the poor to hatch chickens in ovens
like the ancient Egyptians; agricultural schemes for sowing the waste
lands in England with onions, upon the system adopted near Bedford,--net
produce one hundred pounds an acre. In short, according to that paper,
every rood of ground might well maintain its man, and every shilling be,
like Hobson's money-bag, "the fruitful parent of a hundred more." For
three days, at the newspaper room of the Union Club, men talked of this
journal: some pished, some sneered, some wondered; till an ill-natured
mathematician, who had just taken his degree, and had spare time on his
hands, sent a long letter to the "Morning Chronicle," showing up more
blunders, in some article to which the editor of "The Capitalist" had
specially invited attention, than would have paved the whole island of
Laputa. After that time, not a soul read "The Capitalist." How long it
dragged on its existence I know not; but it certainly did not die of a
maladie de langueur.

Little thought I, when I joined in the laugh against "The Capitalist,"
that I ought rather to have followed it to its grave, in black crape and
weepers,--unfeeling wretch that I was! But, like a poet, O "Capitalist"!
thou Overt not discovered and appreciated and prized and mourned till
thou Overt dead and buried, and the bill came in for thy monument.

The first term of my college life was just expiring when I received a
letter from my mother, so agitated, so alarming,--at first reading so
unintelligible,--that I could only see that some great misfortune had
befallen us; and I stopped short and dropped on my knees to pray for the
life and health of those whom that misfortune more specially seemed to
menace; and then, towards the end of the last blurred sentence, read
twice, thrice, over,--I could cry, "Thank Heaven, thank Heaven! it is
only, then, money after all!"

PART XI.

CHAPTER I.

The next day, on the outside of the "Cambridge Telegraph," there was one
passenger who ought to have impressed his fellow-travellers with a very
respectful idea of his lore in the dead languages; for not a single
syllable, in a live one, did he vouchsafe to utter from the moment he
ascended that "bad eminence" to the moment in which he regained his
mother earth. "Sleep," says honest Sancho, "covers a man better than a
cloak." I am ash