e
evil one. Now, think ye that I would have done this grievous wrong to
my soul, body, reputation and estate without a reasonable chance of
profit?"

"Not I, pious Master Pigsnort," said the man with the spectacles. "I
never laid such a great folly to thy charge."

"Truly, I hope not," said the merchant. "Now, as touching this Great
Carbuncle, I am free to own that I have never had a glimpse of it,
but, be it only the hundredth part so bright as people tell, it will
surely outvalue the Great Mogul's best diamond, which he holds at an
incalculable sum; wherefore I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on
shipboard and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or into
heathendom if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word,
dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the
earth, that he may place it among his crown-jewels. If any of ye have
a wiser plan, let him expound it."

"That have I, thou sordid man!" exclaimed the poet. "Dost thou desire
nothing brighter than gold, that thou wouldst transmute all this
ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For
myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my
attic-chamber in one of the darksome alleys of London. There night and
day will I gaze upon it. My soul shall drink its radiance; it shall be
diffused throughout my intellectual powers and gleam brightly in every
line of poesy that I indite. Thus long ages after I am gone the
splendor of the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name."

"Well said, Master Poet!" cried he of the spectacles. "Hide it under
thy cloak, sayest thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes and make
thee look like a jack-o'-lantern!"

"To think," ejaculated the lord De Vere, rather to himself than his
companions, the best of whom he held utterly unworthy of his
intercourse--"to think that a fellow in a tattered cloak should talk
of conveying the Great Carbuncle to a garret in Grubb street! Have not
I resolved within myself that the whole earth contains no fitter
ornament for the great hall of my ancestral castle? There shall it
flame for ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits
of armor, the banners and escutcheons, that hang around the wall, and
keeping bright the memory of heroes. Wherefore have all other
adventurers sought the prize in vain but that I might win it and make
it a symbol of the glories of our lofty line? And never on the diadem
of the White M