"Castles in the air! You talk like the peasant woman with her milk pail! I see a different picture of the man who has become rich among his poor relatives. He, it is true, denies himself nothing and has always thousands of ideas and desires which he gratifies, and which lead him to spend money on thousands of occasions. But let his parents and his brothers come to him, down he sits at his account book, looking important and vexed, sighs, and says, with his pen between his teeth: 'Thank God that you haven't the trouble and burden of administering such a fortune. I'd rather herd goats than watch a pack of spiteful and procrastinating debtors! No money coming in from any of them, and all of them trying to get out of paying and slip through my fingers. Day and night you have to be on the lookout that you are not cheated right and left. And if ever you do get a scoundrel by the collar, he sets up such a howl that you have to let him go in a hurry, or be decried as a usurer and a monster. Every official paper, every notice of days of expiration, every announcement, every advertisement has to be read over and over, or you will miss some petition or overlook some term. And there's never any money on hand. If someone repays a loan, he lays his money bag on the table in all the taverns in town and announces with a swagger that he's paid, and before he's out of the house there are three others waiting to borrow the money, one of whom even wants it without giving security! And then the demands made on you by the community, the charitable institutions, public enterprises, subscription lists of all kinds--they can't be avoided, your position demands it; but I can tell you, you often don't know whether you are standing on your head or your heels. This year I'm harder pressed even than usual; I've had my garden improved and a balcony built on to the house, my wife has been wanting to have it done for a long time, and now here are the bills. My physician has advised me a hundred times to keep a saddle horse--I can't even think of it, for new expenses keep coming up to prevent. Look there, see the little winepress, of the most modern construction, that I had built so that I could press out the Muscatel grapes that I grow on trellises--God knows, I can't pay for it this year. Well, my credit is still good, thank Heaven.'