This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.

Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—­a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her “the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States.  And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele, “was to fall downstairs.”

At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when—­judgment of Heaven!—­here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.  So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.  There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till;—­these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.  Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith an empty pocket.  “You see, I don’t mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar something.”

Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.  If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother’s mote.