I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a fit candidate for his _own_ services in that capacity). But I have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero's guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200 Rhenish guldens (_i.e_. 100_l_.), to say nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense, tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar's scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented) himself in going on to say, "It is easier to bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves alone." Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts, and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her reception (for such he considered his 100_l_. with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what little he _could_ scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. "I'll be handed," he had long ago said, "if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon, to whom they sign away their souls--often their child--that the evil one may give them money and eatables."