He laid down the Bible and took up his ledger.  Ah! how he knew that book!—­to him actually and literally a book of life.  He knew its every page, and every name that headed those pages.  True, Moses knew the generations of the patriarchs, the names of the sons of Jacob, the chronologies of the Chronicles, but he knew the families of Rehoboth better.  These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart.  As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt.  Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed satisfied when he discovered that his illness would not involve him in the loss which he had anticipated; and smiling the smile of selfish gain, he closed his eyes and slept.

Poor Moses Fletcher!  For with all his riches he was poor—­if being a pauper in the sight of Heaven is to be poor.  How he had lived to make money, and, having made it, how terrible was the cost!  Old Mr. Morell once told him that the angels reversed his balance year by year, writing in invisible ink against his material profits his moral and spiritual depreciation.  And yet there was one redeeming feature in the character of Moses—­he loved his dog.  ‘Captain,’ as the brute was called, kept one spot warm in his callous nature, a little patch of vegetation on the bare surface of his granite heart.  The only noble acts in the life of Moses Fletcher were acts wrought on behalf of this dog.  Years ago he risked his life to save it, when, as a whelp, mischievous boys sought to drown it in the Green Fold Lodge; and only a week or two ago he rescued it from the infuriated grip of a bull-terrier, at the expense of injuries from which he was now slowly recovering.  Wherever Moses went he was followed by his dog; and if the dog was seen alone it was known Moses was not far distant.  Now, this dog had to suffer for Moses’ sins.  It was, as Mr. Penrose used to say, ’a vicarious dog’—­the innocent bearing the sins of the guilty.  Affectionate, faithful, gentle, with no spice of viciousness in its nature, it was none the less stoned by children and tormented by man and woman alike.  One of Moses’ debtors, a stalwart quarryman, once took it on the moors and sent it home with a spray of prickly holly tied under its tail.  On another occasion, an Irish labourer, whom Moses put in the County Court, hurled a handful of quicklime in its eye, by which its sight had been in part destroyed; and its glossy skin was all patched with bare spots where outraged housewives had doused it with scalding water.

‘We cornd get at him,’ they used to say, ’but we con get at his dog, and mak’ him smart i’ that road.’