“I understand,” said David, “an’ if I had my life to live over agin, knowin’ what I do now, I’d do diff’rent in a number o’ ways.  I often think,” he proceeded, as he took a pull at the cigar and emitted the smoke with a chewing movement of his mouth, “of what Andy Brown used to say.  Andy was a curious kind of a customer ’t I used to know up to Syrchester.  He liked good things, Andy did, an’ didn’t scrimp himself when they was to be had—­that is, when he had the go-an’-fetch-it to git ’em with.  He used to say, ’Boys, whenever you git holt of a ten-dollar note you want to git it into ye or onto ye jest ’s quick ’s you kin.  We’re here to-day an’ gone to-morrer,’ he’d say, ‘an’ the’ ain’t no pocket in a shroud,’ an’ I’m dum’d if I don’t think sometimes,” declared Mr. Harum, “that he wa’n’t very fur off neither.  ’T any rate,” he added with a philosophy unexpected by his hearer, “’s I look back, it ain’t the money ’t I’ve spent fer the good times ’t I’ve had ’t I regret; it’s the good times ’t I might ’s well ‘ve had an’ didn’t.  I’m inclined to think,” he remarked with an air of having given the matter consideration, “that after Adam an’ Eve got bounced out of the gard’n they kicked themselves as much as anythin’ fer not havin’ cleaned up the hull tree while they was about it.”

John laughed and said that that was very likely among their regrets.

“Trouble with me was,” said David, “that till I was consid’able older ’n you be I had to scratch grav’l like all possessed, an’ it’s hard work now sometimes to git the idee out of my head but what the money’s wuth more ’n the things.  I guess,” he remarked, looking at the ivory-backed brushes and the various toilet knick-knacks of cut-glass and silver which adorned John’s bureau, and indicating them with a motion of his hand, “that up to about now you ben in the habit of figurin’ the other way mostly.”

“Too much so, perhaps,” said John; “but yet, after all, I don’t think I am sorry.  I wouldn’t spend the money for those things now, but I am glad I bought them when I did.”

“Jess so, jess so,” said David appreciatively.  He reached over to the table and laid his cigar on the edge of a book, and, reaching for his hip pocket, produced a silver tobacco box, at which he looked contemplatively for a moment, opening and shutting the lid with a snap.

“There,” he said, holding it out on his palm, “I was twenty years makin’ up my mind to buy that box, an’ to this day I can’t bring myself to carry it all the time.  Yes, sir, I wanted that box fer twenty years.  I don’t mean to say that I didn’t spend the wuth of it foolishly times over an’ agin, but I couldn’t never make up my mind to put that amount o’ money into that pertic’ler thing.  I was alwus figurin’ that some day I’d have a silver tobacco box, an’ I sometimes think the reason it seemed so extrav’gant, an’ I put it off so long, was because I wanted it so much.  Now I s’pose you couldn’t understand that, could ye?”