“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.

In consequence of this compromise, the demon by degrees took seat at his breakfast-table, when Mrs. Wicklow, his landlady, could hear Anthony talking in the tone of voice of one who was pushed to his sturdiest arguments.  She conceived that the old man’s head was softening.

He was making one of his hurried rushes with the porterage of money on an afternoon in Spring, when a young female plucked at his coat, and his wrath at offenders against the law kindled in a minute into fury.

“Hands off, minx!” he cried.  “You shall be given in charge.  Where’s a policeman?”

“Uncle!” she said.

“You precious swindler in petticoats!” Anthony fumed.

But he had a queer recollection of her face, and when she repeated piteously:  “Uncle!” he peered at her features, saying,—­