r his skill and attention, and assuring
him that he had had great satisfaction in submitting himself to such
competent hands, and should certainly apply to him again in case he
should have any occasion for a medical adviser. We must not be too
sagacious in judging people by the little excrescences of their
character. Ex pede Herculem may often prove safe enough, but ex verruca
Tullium is liable to mislead a hasty judge of his fellow-men.

I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about
them. In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to
ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of
handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned
miser. It is by no means to be despised. Three or four hundred dollars
in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on. There is something
very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the metallic clink,
very satisfying in the singular weight, and very stimulating in
the feeling that all the world over these same yellow disks are the
master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go, the servants that
bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except virtue,--and a good
deal of what passes for that. I confess, then, to an honest liking for
the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of
the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion,
the delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy
hovel, takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen
pots with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and
fingering the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of
earthly and angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas
into his palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the
yellow heaps before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of
thinking him. He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or
a poem to help our imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us
into the emotional states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal
characters pictured in the book we are reading. But think of him and the
significance of the symbols he is handling as compared with the empty
syllables and words we are using to build our aerial edifices with!
In this hand he holds the smile of beauty and in that the dagger of
revenge. The contents of that old glove will buy him the w