Firm in his determination to secure himself against the future, he opposed this strenuous piety to those temptations which beset the individual, refusing numberless appeals, often much against his instincts of compassion; opposing with his vote and all his influence movements to increase the rates or income-tax for such purposes as the raising of funds to enable aged people without means to die more slowly. He himself, who laid up yearly more and more for the greater safety of his family, felt, no doubt--though cynicism shocked him--that these old persons were only an encumbrance to _their_ families, and should be urged to dwindle gently out. In such private cases as he came across, feeling how hard it was, he prayed for strength to keep his hand out of his pocket, and strength was often given him. So with many other invitations to depart from virtue. He fixed a certain sum a year--a hundred pounds--with half-a-crown in the velvet bag on Sundays--to be offered as libations to all strange gods, so that they might leave him undisturbed to worship the true god of money. This was effectual; the strange gods, finding him a man of strong religious principle, yet no crank--his name appeared in twenty charitable lists, five pounds apiece--soon let him be, for fear of wasting postage stamps and the under parts of boots. After his wife’s death, which came about when he was seventy, he continued to reside alone in the house that he had lived in since his marriage, though it was now too large for him. Every autumn he resolved to make a change next spring; but when spring came, he could not bring himself to tear his old roots up, and put it off till the spring following, with the hope, perhaps, that he might then feel more inclined. All through the years that he was living there alone, he suffered more and more from those nightly visitations, of monetary doubts. They seemed, indeed, to grow more concrete and insistent with every thousand pounds he put between himself and their reality. They became more owl-like, more numerous, with each fresh investment; they stayed longer at a time. And he grew thinner, frailer, every year; pouches came beneath his eyes. When he was eighty, his daughter, with her husband and children, came to live with him. This seemed to give him a fresh lease of life. He never missed, if he could help it, a visit to the nursery at five o’clock. There, surrounded by toy bricks, he would remain an hour or more, building--banks or houses, ships or churches, sometimes police-stations, sometimes cemeteries, but generally banks. And when the edifice approached completion, in the glory of its long white bricks, he waited with a sort of secret ecstasy to feel a small warm body climb his back, and hear a small voice say in his ear: “What shall we put in the bank to-day, Granddy?”