He laughed again. "Yes; keep them on and help me out of this scrape--I have never felt so humiliated in my life as I have taking this money. Now I 'll be rational. You see, smallpox roams at times through Canada. This money has been stored in stockings, instead of banks, after having been hoarded, handled, greased, soiled by a generation or more. You 'll find dates of issue on these notes that are a good deal older than you, and silver minted in the early sixties. Now I want your help in counting over--auditing, we 'll call it--this mass of corruption. And I don't intend you shall run any risk in handling even a small part of it--hence the gloves and the fresh air. After we 're through with it, we will pack the filthy lucre in the box and express it to a Montreal bank. It is n't mine--at least I do not consider it so." "Why not?" "Because I am going to apply these half-yearly rents in reducing the interest on the money I am loaning these farmers, in order to enable them to buy the best implements and cultivate their land more intelligently. This I may say to you, but to no one else." "You are going to sell them the land?" "The greater part of it. The forest I keep, because I love that work and hope in time to make a sufficient income from it, in case of actual need. In fact, I 've been working all the week with the notary to get the deeds in order." "So that was their 'bonnes nouvelles'?" "You heard them?" "Yes. They looked so happy--" "Oh, I am glad; glad too, that you could see something of their pleasure in this special work of mine. Do you know,"--he leaned towards me over the table,--"that I have asked you to help me with this as a matter of pure sentiment?" His eyes sought mine, but I am sure they found only an enquiring turn of mind in them, for I could not imagine where the sentiment was in evidence. "I see I 'll have to explain," he said smiling. "I want you, an American with all the free inheritance of the American, to share with me in this last rite of mediævalism, in order that in the future we may look back to it--and mark our own progress." Oh, that word "our"! Used so freely, it rejoiced me. He intended this affair to mark some epoch in his life and mine. I waited for him to say something further. But, instead, he turned to the business in hand and we set to work. To be sure the "auditing" on my part was a mere farce; for not only did Mr. Ewart do most of the counting, and making into bundles of a hundred, but he insisted on my not bending close over the currency to watch him. As I told him, "After asking me to help you, you keep me at arm's distance." Whereupon he smiled in an amused way, and said engagingly, but firmly: