Anthony had laid out money to welcome the farmer, and was shy and fidgety as a girl who anticipates the visit of a promising youth, over his fat goose for next day’s dinner, and his shrimps for this day’s tea, and his red slice of strong cheese, called of Cheshire by the reckless butter-man, for supper.

He knew that both Dahlia and Rhoda must have told the farmer that he was not high up in Boyne’s Bank, and it fretted him to think that the mysterious respect entertained for his wealth by the farmer, which delighted him with a novel emotion, might be dashed by what the farmer would behold.

During his last visit to the farm, Anthony had talked of the Funds more suggestively than usual.  He had alluded to his own dealings in them, and to what he would do and would not do under certain contingencies; thus shadowing out, dimly luminous and immense, what he could do, if his sagacity prompted the adventure.  The farmer had listened through the buzzing of his uncertain grief, only sighing for answer.  “If ever you come up to London, brother William John,” said Anthony, “you mind you go about arm-in-arm with me, or you’ll be judging by appearances, and says you, ‘Lor’, what a thousander fellow this is!’ and ’What a millioner fellow that is!’ You’ll be giving your millions and your thousands to the wrong people, when they haven’t got a penny.  All London ’ll be topsy-turvy to you, unless you’ve got a guide, and he’ll show you a shabby-coated, head-in-the-gutter old man ’ll buy up the lot.  Everybody that doesn’t know him says—­look at him! but they that knows him—­hats off, I can tell you.  And talk about lords!  We don’t mind their coming into the city, but they know the scent of cash.  I’ve had a lord take off his hat to me.  It’s a fact, I have.”

In spite of the caution Anthony had impressed upon his country relative, that he should not judge by appearances, he was nevertheless under an apprehension that the farmer’s opinion of him, and the luxurious, almost voluptuous, enjoyment he had of it, were in peril.  When he had purchased the well-probed fat goose, the shrimps, and the cheese, he was only half-satisfied.  His ideas shot boldly at a bottle of wine, and he employed a summer-lighted evening in going a round of wine-merchants’ placards, and looking out for the cheapest bottle he could buy.  And he would have bought one—­he had sealing-wax of his own and could have stamped it with the office-stamp of Boyne’s Bank for that matter, to make it as dignified and costly as the vaunted red seals and green seals of the placards—­he would have bought one, had he not, by one of his lucky mental illuminations, recollected that it was within his power to procure an order to taste wine at the Docks, where you may get as much wine as you like out of big sixpenny glasses, and try cask after cask, walking down gas-lit paths between the huge bellies of wine which groan to be tapped and tried, that men may know them.