cool intent of feigning a responsive flame for other and
more selfish ends. Their husbands are known to be rich, and they are
said to have the free use of their husbands' wealth. So his conclusion
is, that they are "a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty: they shall
be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both." In his
spendthrift self-indulgence, notwithstanding all the supplies which
his purse-taking habits and his late imputed service bring in, he has
come to be hard-up for cash, insomuch that his rascal followers are
for deserting him and turning to other resources. By driving a
love-intrigue with the women, he expects to work the keys to the full
coffers which they have at such command, and thus to replenish his
low-ebbing means.

Thus we here have Sir John in the process of complacently feeding his
glutton fancies with matter raked from the foulest gutters of
baseness. The women, burning with anger and shame, knock their wits
together for revenge; and the answer which they, in their
shrewdly-concerted plan, return to his advances is to him a pledge of
entire success: he is so transported, that he leaps clean out of his
senses forthwith, and the giddiness of his newly-fired conceit fairly
puts out the eyes of his understanding. His vanity is now quite
omnivorous: once possessed with the monstrous idea of having become
an object of love in such a place, nothing is too gross for him to
swallow. The raw and unspiced stuffings of Master Brook convey to him
no hint of mistrust: he drinks them in with unfaltering confidence;
and opens his breast to this total stranger as freely as if he were
his sworn and long-tried counsellor; the offered bribe of the man's
money so falling in with the other baits of greed as to swamp his
discretion utterly. After being cheated through the adventures of the
buck-basket, where he was "stopped in with stinking clothes that
fretted in their own grease," he appears indeed to have some smell of
the gross trickery played upon him; and vows to himself that, if he be
served such another trick, he will have his brains taken out, and
buttered, and given to a dog for a new-year's gift. But still his
vanity and thirst of money are too much for his startled prudence:
upon the offer of a second device, that too of a very flimsy texture,
and very thinly disguised, his paralysis of wit returns, and his
suspicions sink afresh into their dreamless nap. In the hard blows and
buffets there