walk with my neighbour arm-in-arm as a
friend, you follow with an eye upon his pockets.
As a man of business you reply that the mole
turns up and stores up many a treasure, but
that the lark finds neither worms nor earthnuts
in the empty sky. Also that I get no butter
for my parsnips from the soft words of my
neighbour, while it is you only who know
how to get at his purse. It is for me to
starve, for you to fatten. But you see, Claypaw,
I do not starve.

That brewery transaction. There, you
think, you have me on the hip. Didn't I go
and invest all my capital in partnership with
a stranger whom I took to be an honest man,
but who turned out to be a scamp? Didn't
I get involved? Wasn't I forced to borrow?
Didn't I narrowly escape bankruptcy? Didn't
I incur obligations that were for years a drag
upon my after life; hadn't I to eat bread
for years when I was earning cake? And
wasn't that enough to sicken me of putting
confidence in man? Mr. Claypaw, to all your
first questions, yes; but to your last, emphatically
no. That brewery transaction is the
source of half my belief in the goodness of
humanity.

When I was a young man and wrote poetry,
my heart was shattered three several times
—once by Polly Bacon, aged eleven—but
her whom once I loved the most, I soon forgot
I had loved at all. My ill-fated heart next
became an abandoned urn on account of
Mary Louisa Johnson, who was too like a
dream of Heaven to be merited by me, and
went to a school at Tonbridge Wells, from
which she went to an aunt in Ireland for the
holidays. My breast then thrilled before the
look of Maria Susannah, but before I was
nineteen years old I sang on account of her,
in the spirit of a poet who in those days was
a favourite of mine,
   "Away! away! my early dream,
      Remembrance never must awake:
    Oh! where is Lethe's fabled stream?
      My foolish heart, be still, or break."
It would not be still, and it broke. Now
while so many breakages were going on
within me, I was not at all contented with
the world. It was a great abstraction.
Something very hard and very cold. My
soul began with an S for summer, the
world with a W for wkiter. They were
opposites. It never occurred to me that the
world in which I sulked was a great universe
of souls.

How I despised money! The pelf for
which men sold themselves, the calf they
worshipped, when was not even I a much
more proper calf for them to honour? That
men with money comforted their parents in
old age, fed and instructed children; that it
represented physical existence, and that the
struggle for it was ordained in Heaven as a
method of developing society, of widening
the human intellect, of testing, exercising
strengthening the virtues that are in us, I
never then so much as dreamed. I said that
men kept their hearts locked up in their
cash-boxes, and called the search for gold a
species of slavery, compared it to forced toiling
in the mines. For then I was too young
to see what some have never yet discovered,
that out of the active honest struggle, even
for the gold we sneer at, ought to come the
health and freedom of the spirit; that the
mind so labouring and putting forth all its
resources and its strength, is as the body
that becomes athletic by good honest toil in
the free air; that the mind with few desires
to carry it abroad is as the body locked in
jail, or growing cumbrous and unwholesome
in the hermit's cell. If money be loved, not
for itself, but for its uses (truly they suffer
who misuse it), I have begun now to think
that it lies at the root not only of all
commerce, all civilisation, but that it gives rise
to nine-tenths of all the strong and active
virtue in the world, as truly as ever it can
have been said to beget nine-tenths of all the
vice.

Now, my dear cousin, I got these very
theoretical opinions out of my unlucky
brewery transaction. I had sung about the
Hollow World, and the false tinsel that made
up the triumphs on its stage. Thereafter I
made my debut in it and broke down. But I
was not hissed. The little bark of my
fortunes after I had launched it was unfortunately
boarded by a pirate who hung out
false colours; I was allured, plundered, taken
in tow for a short time, and cut adrift. But
so adrift I found that the ships on the high
seas were not all pirate vessels, and that their
captains were not dead to the requirements
of a vessel in distress.

I know, my dear Claypaw, your distaste for
metaphorical statements of all kinds. I beg,
therefore, to inform you plainly that I had
reason to feel the Hearts, with a capital H, of
business men beating quite warmly, often
under formal letters three lines long, that began
with "Mr. Phineas Green, Sir," and ended
with "obedient servants, Firm, Brothers, and
Co." I found that so long as any Firm,
Brothers, and Co. felt satisfied that Mr.
Phineas Green, Sir, was trying no experiments
of tactics with them, they met truth
with trust, candour with liberality and kindness.
Some there were who went selfishly
to work, but I found the world on the whole,
though I had such bad luck in it, warm to the
bone. Though nobody would do my own
work for me, and supply my purse out of
his own coffers, I expected that from none
But I found reason to expect and did receive
from A. B., from C. D., from E. F., and
from a whole alphabet of strangers, a full
return for all frank trust that I was taught
to put in them. With very few exceptions, I
had only to believe men good and find them
so. Cousin Claypaw, should the Bank of
England ever break, and should you ever