"Lord bless me, yes!" answered the dirty maid, shouting in return from the kitchen, like Achilles from the trenches, "As fast shut as hands can make them." "What is that noise, then?" demanded the miser, suspiciously. "Only me putting in the lower bolt of the back-door," answered the maid. "Oh Sally, Sally! you never will do things at the time you are bid!" cried the reproachful usurer. "I told you always to shut up at dusk. But come here, and put on your bonnet I want you to run down to the town for a stamp." Sally grumbled something about going out so late, and meeting impudent men in the lanes; but after a lapse of time, which the miser thought somewhat extraordinary in length, she appeared equipped for the walk, and received her master's written directions as to the stamp, or rather stamps, he wanted, and where they were to be found in Emberton. The miser then saw her to the door, locked, bolted, and barred it, after her departure, and returning to the parlour, lifted the dim and long wicked candle, bearing on its pale and sickly sides, the evidence of many a dirty thumb and finger; and then with slow, and somewhat feeble steps, climbed, one by one, the stairs, and retired to a high apartment at the back of the house, for which he seemed to entertain a deep and reverential affection. Well, indeed, might he love it; for it was the temple of his divinity, the place in which his riches and his heart reposed, and which contained his every feeling. There, shrined in a safe of iron, let into the wall, were the Lares and Penates of his house, bearing either the goodly forms of golden disks--with the face of the fourth George pre-eminent on one side, and of his namesake saint all saddleless and naked, on the other--or otherwise, the forms of paper parallelograms, inscribed with cabalistic characters, implying promises to pay. Here Mr. Tims sat down after having closed the door, and placed the candle on a table; and, throwing one leg clothed in its black worsted stocking over the other, he sat in a sort of rapt and reverential trance, worshipping mammon devoutly, in the appropriate forms of vulgar and decimal fractions, interest, simple and compound.