From that time, what he called his life was a continuous course
of what he called success, and he died one of the richest dirt-
beetles of the age, bequeathing great wealth to his son, and
leaving a reputation for substantial worth behind him; hardly
leaving it, I fancy, for surely he found it waiting him where he
went. He had been guilty of a thousand meannesses, oppressions,
rapacities, and some quiet rogueries, but none of them worse than
those of many a man whose ultimate failure has been the sole
cause of his excommunication by the society which all the time
knew well enough what he was. Often had he been held up by
would-be teachers as a pattern to aspiring youth of what might
be achieved by unwavering attention to _the main chance_,
combined with unassailable honesty: from his experience they
would once more prove to a gaping world the truth of the maxim,
the highest intelligible to a base soul, that "honesty is the
best policy." With his money he left to his son the seeds of a
varied meanness, which bore weeds enough, but curiously, neither
avarice nor, within the bounds of a modest prudence, any
unwillingness to part with money--a fact which will probably
appear the stranger when I have told the following anecdote
concerning a brother of the father, of whom few indeed mentioned
in my narrative ever heard.
This man was a joiner, or working cabinet-maker, or something of
the sort.
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