“The idea is a splendid one.  None better.  But there is one slight difficulty in the way.  Where are you to find your country that has no dogs?  If there were such a happy land on the face of this earth, Overtop would have hunted it up long ago, and moved there.”

Overtop laughingly replied, “That’s so.”  He then informed Mr. Tiffles, while admitting the theoretical excellence of his idea, that every nation had its dogs as well as its fleas.  Those two friends of man were impartially distributed over the terrestrial globe.  Overtop referred to the standard Cyclopaedias, and several works on Natural History, in proof of his assertion.

“Can’t be! can’t be!” retorted Wesley Tiffles, who was at first disposed to defend his brilliant idea.  But brilliant ideas were a common growth of his fertile mind, and, like all things easily produced, he held them cheaply.  The moment that evidence, or the test of practice, showed them to be fallacious, he gave them up, and drew upon his brain for others.  So, after a second’s reflection, he added: 

“Perhaps you are right.  Dogs are not exactly in my line, after all.  But the idea, as an idea, was magnificent.”

As Wesley Tiffles spoke, he repeated the act, for the twentieth time, of throwing back his overcoat (a little seedy), and opening his vest, as if to draw attention to his shirt front, whose natural whiteness was toned down by a delicate neutral tint.  Immediately afterward, he placed his hand on a small breastpin in the centre of the shirt front, and turned it to the right and left.  It sparkled for the first time in the rays of the fire, and revealed to the experienced eyes of the three bachelors simultaneously, that Wesley Tiffles was the wearer of a real diamond.

“Excuse me,” said Marcus Wilkeson, who divined that Tiffles wished his diamond to be remarked upon, “but that is pretty!”

“Pretty!  What?” said Tiffles, looking about the room.

“That diamond.”

“Oh! the diamond.  Perhaps you would like to look at it?” (hands it round for inspection).  “Cost forty dollars.  Rather a hard draw on my exchequer” (that was Mr. Tiffles’s word for a friend’s pocket); “but I considered it a most judicious investment for a young man just going into business.”

The novelty of this idea was not lost on Fayette Overtop.  “Pray explain, Tiffles,” said he.

“Cheerfully,” said Tiffles, replacing the gem in his shirt front, after it had been duly handled and admired.  “Nobody will acknowledge that he is taken in by a diamond.  He will say, ’Anybody can buy a diamond, by saving up thirty or forty dollars; and why should I believe a man to be rich who wears one?’ Yet, in his heart of hearts, he does believe it, unless the possessor of the diamond has the bad taste to dress flashily.  Then he passes for an impostor, and people will doubt, even against their own senses, the genuineness of the stone.  But let him dress plainly, as I do,” continued Mr. Tiffles, stroking down the left leg of his black trowsers, shiny with wear, “and that little diamond shall stand, in the eyes of the whole world, as the representative of a fat bank account, a brown stone house, and a couple of corner lots.”