sudden jerk forward of his forbidding face--"what do you
say to L600?"

Unsophisticated as he was, "Cobbler" Horn felt that the proposal was
exorbitant.

"You are surely joking?" he said.

"You think the price too small?"

"I consider it much too large."

"Well, perhaps I was joking, as you said. What do you think of L500?"

"I'm afraid even that is too much. I'll give you L450."

Daniel Froud hesitated for some minutes, but at last said, "Well, I'll
take your offer, Mr. Horn; but it's a dreadful sacrifice."

A few minutes sufficed to complete the agreement; and then, in taking his
departure, "Cobbler" Horn administered a word of admonition to his
grasping landlord.

"Don't you know, friend," he said, "that it is a grievous sin to try to
sell anything for more than it is worth? And how contemptible it is to be
so greedy of money! It does not seem to me that money is to be so eagerly
desired, and especially if it does one no more good than yours seems to be
doing you. Good morning, friend; and God give you repentance."

Mr. Froud had listened open-mouthed to this plain-spoken homily. When he
came to himself, he darted forward, and aimed a blow with his fist, which
just failed to strike the back of his visitor, who was in the act of
leaving the room.

Confronting him in the doorway was the old crone who kept his house.

"Was that Horn, the shoemaker?" she asked.

"Yes, woman."

"Horn as has just come into the fortune?"

"Well--somewhat."

"'Somewhat!' It's said to be about a million of money! Look here!" and she
showed him a begrimed and crumpled scrap of newspaper, containing a full
account of "Cobbler" Horn's fortune.

With a cry, Daniel Froud seized the woman, and shook her till it almost
seemed as though the bones rattled in her skin.

"You hell-cat! Why didn't you tell me that before?"

The wretched creature fell back panting against the door on the opposite
side of the passage.

"Daniel Froud," she said, when she had sufficiently recovered her breath,
"the next time you do that I shall give you notice."

With which dreadful threat, she gathered herself together, and hobbled
back to her own quarter of the dingy house, leaving Mr. Froud to bemoan
the absurdly easy terms he had made with "the Golden Shoemaker."

"If I had only known!" he moaned; "if I had only known!"

That evening "Cobbler" Horn told his sister what he had done, and why he
had done it; and she held up her hands in dismay.