“Ah! poor Susan! an upright woman before the Lord.”

“She was,” said the farmer, bowing his head.

“And a good wife,” Anthony interjected.

“None better—­never a better; and I wish she was living to look after her girls.”

“I came through the churchyard, hard by,” said Anthony; “and I read that writing on her tombstone.  It went like a choke in my throat.  The first person I saw next was her child, this young gal you call Rhoda; and, thinks I to myself, you might ask me, I’d do anything for ye—­that I could, of course.”

The farmer’s eye had lit up, but became overshadowed by the characteristic reservation.

“Nobody’d ask you to do more than you could,” he remarked, rather coldly.

“It’ll never be much,” sighed Anthony.

“Well, the world’s nothing, if you come to look at it close,” the farmer adopted a similar tone.

“What’s money!” said Anthony.

The farmer immediately resumed his this-worldliness: 

“Well, it’s fine to go about asking us poor devils to answer ye that,” he said, and chuckled, conceiving that he had nailed Anthony down to a partial confession of his ownership of some worldly goods.

“What do you call having money?” observed the latter, clearly in the trap.  “Fifty thousand?”

“Whew!” went the farmer, as at a big draught of powerful stuff.

“Ten thousand?”

Mr. Fleming took this second gulp almost contemptuously, but still kindly.

“Come,” quoth Anthony, “ten thousand’s not so mean, you know.  You’re a gentleman on ten thousand.  So, on five.  I’ll tell ye, many a gentleman’d be glad to own it.  Lor’ bless you!  But, you know nothing of the world, brother William John.  Some of ’em haven’t one—­ain’t so rich as you!”

“Or you, brother Tony?” The farmer made a grasp at his will-o’-the-wisp.

“Oh! me!” Anthony sniggered.  “I’m a scraper of odds and ends.  I pick up things in the gutter.  Mind you, those Jews ain’t such fools, though a curse is on ’em, to wander forth.  They know the meaning of the multiplication table.  They can turn fractions into whole numbers.  No; I’m not to be compared to gentlemen.  My property’s my respectability.  I said that at the beginning, and I say it now.  But, I’ll tell you what, brother William John, it’s an emotion when you’ve got bags of thousands of pounds in your arms.”

Ordinarily, the farmer was a sensible man, as straight on the level of dull intelligence as other men; but so credulous was he in regard to the riches possessed by his wife’s brother, that a very little tempted him to childish exaggeration of the probable amount.  Now that Anthony himself furnished the incitement, he was quite lifted from the earth.  He had, besides, taken more of the strong mixture than he was ever accustomed to take in the middle of the day; and as it seemed to him that Anthony was really about to be seduced