“In that case, sir, I really do not see how I can do business with you.”

True enough; and Roger would never have been such a monetary blockhead, had he not been now so generally tipsy; the fumes of beer had mingled with his plan, and all his usual shrewdness had been blunted into folly by greediness of lucre on the one side, and potent liquors on the other.  The moment that the banker’s parting speech had reached his ear, the absurdity of Roger’s scheme was evident even to himself, and with a bare “Good day, Master,” he hurriedly took his bundle from the counter, and scuttled out as quick as he could.

His feelings, walking homeward, were any thing but pleasant; the bubble of his ardent hope was burst:  he never could have more than the paltry little sum he carried in that bundle:  what a miser he would be of it:  how mean it now seemed in his eyes—­a mere sample-bag of seed, instead of the wide-waving harvest!  Ah, well; he would save and scrape—­ay, and go back to toil again—­do any thing rather than spend.

Got home, the difficulty now recurred, where was he to hide it?  The store was a greater care than ever, now those rascally bankers knew of it.  He racked his brain to find a hiding-place, and, at length, really hit upon a good one.  He concealed the crock, now replenished with its contents, in the thatch just over his bed’s head:  it was a rescued darling:  so he tore a deep hole, and nested it quite snugly.

Perhaps it did not matter much, but the rain leaked in by that hole all night, and fortunate Roger woke in the morning drenched with wet, and racked by rheumatism.

CHAPTER XIX.

CALUMNY.

MORE blessings issue from the crock; Pandora’s box is set wide open, and all the sweet inhabitants come forth.  If apprehensions for its safety made the finder full of care, the increased whisperings of the neighbourhood gave him even deeper reason for anxiety.  In vain he told lie upon lie about a legacy of some old uncle in the clouds; in vain he stuck to the foolish and transparent falsehood, with a dogged pertinacity that appealed, not to reason, but to blows; in vain he made affirmation weaker by his oath, and oaths quite unconvincing by his cudgel:  no one believed him:  and the mystery was rendered more inexplicable from his evidently nervous state and uneasy terror of discovery.

He had resolved at the outset, cunningly as he fancied, to change no more than one piece of gold in the same place; though Bacchus’s undoubtedly proved the rule by furnishing an exception:  and the consequence came to be, that there was not a single shop in the whole county town, nor a farm-house in all the neighbourhood round, where Roger Acton had not called to change a sovereign.  True, the silver had seldom been forthcoming; still, he had asked for it; and where in life could he have got the gold?  Many was the rude questioner, whose curiosity had been quenched in drink; many the insufferable pryer, whom club-law had been called upon to silence.  Meanwhile, Roger steadily kept on, accumulating silver where he could:  for his covetous mind delighted in the mere semblance of an increase to his store, and took some untutored numismatic interest in those pretty variations of his idol—­money.