What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony’s estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne’s Farm?—­when, in point of fact, he found that he had all along been the richer man of the two!

Anthony’s comfort was in the unfaltering strength of his constitution.  He permitted his estimate of it to hint at the probability of his outlasting his brother William John, to whom he wished no earthly ill, but only that he should not live with a mitigated veneration for him.  He was really nourished by the farmer’s gluttonous delight in his supposed piles of wealth.  Sometimes, for weeks, he had the gift of thinking himself one of the Bank with which he had been so long connected; and afterward a wretched reaction set in.

It was then that his touch upon Bank money began to intoxicate him strangely.  He had at times thousands hugged against his bosom, and his heart swelled to the money-bags immense.  He was a dispirited, but a grateful creature, after he had delivered them up.  The delirium came by fits, as if a devil lurked to surprise him.

“With this money,” said the demon, “you might speculate, and in two days make ten times the amount.”

To which Anthony answered:  “My character’s worth fifty times the amount.”

Such was his reply, but he did not think it.  He was honest, and his honesty had become a habit; but the money was the only thing which acted on his imagination; his character had attained to no sacred halo, and was just worth his annual income and the respect of the law for his person.  The money fired his brain!

“Ah! if it was mine!” he sighed.  “If I could call it mine for just forty or fifty hours!  But it ain’t, and I can’t.”

He fought dogged battles with the tempter, and beat him off again and again.  One day he made a truce with him by saying that if ever the farmer should be in town of an afternoon he would steal ten minutes or so, and make an appointment with him somewhere and show him the money-bags without a word:  let him weigh and eye them:  and then the plan was for Anthony to talk of politics, while the farmer’s mind was in a ferment.

With this arrangement the infernal Power appeared to be content, and Anthony was temporarily relieved of his trouble.  In other words, the intermittent fever of a sort of harmless rascality was afflicting this old creature.  He never entertained the notion of running clear away with the money entrusted to him.

Whither could an aged man fly?  He thought of foreign places as of spots that gave him a shivering sense of its being necessary for him to be born again in nakedness and helplessness, if ever he was to see them and set foot on them.

London was his home, and clothed him about warmly and honourably, and so he said to the demon in their next colloquy.

Anthony had become guilty of the imprudence of admitting him to conferences and arguing with him upon equal terms.  They tell us, that this is the imprudence of women under temptation; and perhaps Anthony was pushed to the verge of the abyss from causes somewhat similar to those which imperil them, and employed the same kind of efforts in his resistance.