supplies Jericho’s knocker.

The waistcoat that six weeks ago had wrapt Jericho, lay on the ground. How wide and large it looked! An expanded cere-cloth of perished flesh! How much of him—of him, Jericho—was once in that waistcoat that was now—where? It could not be possible that the bank in his bosom was supplied at the cost of his fleshly substance? He was not paying himself away transmuted into paper? Pooh! Nonsense! He never felt better; never felt so hard and firm. Nevertheless, he looked upon the waistcoat as upon an opened book, written with mortal meanings. And then again he felt assured his fleshly store did not supply his money, and then—he determined to measure his waist, and in exactest balance—unknown to all men—to weigh himself every morning. The first part of the discipline he would immediately commence. Whereupon, with a silken lace he encompassed his chest, snipping close where both ends joined. Scarcely had he finished the operation, when light, yet peremptory fingers, tapped at the door. “May I come in, love?” It was the voice of Mrs. Jericho.

“Certainly,” said Jericho; “what do you want, Sabilla, my dear?”

Let us endeavour to explain this mutual familiarity. The[Pg 77] truth is, in a very soft moment Jericho had murmured to his wife this honey-sweet intelligence—He knew no bounds to his wealth! Whereupon, with a responsive burst of sympathy, Mrs. Jericho declared that, in such case, she saw no end to his greatness. We have said that Mrs. Jericho was a woman of great imagination. Instantaneously she beheld herself upon the topmost peak of the Mountains of Millions; whose altitude is just ten thousand thousand times higher than the Mountains of the Moon. So high that the biggest pearls in the very oldest coronets appeared to Mrs. Jericho no bigger than mustard-seed. With boundless riches she instantly felt boundless ambition. Mrs. Jericho had ever made her best curtsey to the power of wealth: but with the unexpected Plutus as her guest, she was suddenly rapt, sublimated. The Lady Macbeth of a money-box.

[Pg 77]

“Solomon,”—never until his day of riches had even his own wife called him Solomon—“make haste: you are wanted. Something very particular—a great proposal—vital to us—all we could wish.”

“Who is it, my dear? What’s it about?” asked Jericho with dull composure.

“I have already told you,”—said Mrs. Jericho in a deep, organ note—“that you may fill the world. You shall fill it.” Jericho rubbed his 

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