Le Brocq answered doggedly, as he had always done before, that he had not the money. If any body had told him, when he took the business, that, independently of his scrape with the Excise Court, he should now be without money, he would not have believed it, after all that had been held out to him about the quantity of money he should make. It was not from spending. He had pinched and toiled more than he had ever done in Jersey; and all to plunge himself deeper. If he had been out of business, dressing his wife in velvet, and feasting on foreign fruits and claret, he would have paid less to the state than he had done as an employer of workmen, denying himself and his family, meantime, anything beyond the commonest comforts of life. It was the paying several times over that was enough to ruin any man. The workmen could not pay the taxes upon everything that they ate, and drank, and wore. Their wages were raised in proportion; so that their masters paid. No man should judge of his fortune by his returns till he knew what he had to pay in wages. O, yes; he charged these wages in the price of his bottles, so that the bottle consumers paid in their turn: but he, as a consumer of other things, paid in his turn, in like manner; till, among so many outgoings, he had no money left. And all for what? To contribute his share towards the expenses of government, which he might have paid, if he had been properly asked, at half the cost, and a hundredth part of the pain and trouble! “But you did not like that way of paying when you were in Jersey, father.” “Because I was told there was a better, and was fool enough to believe it. It is the most shameful hoax, the making me pay as I have paid since I came here! You need not look so frightened, as if I was talking treason,” he continued, seeing that Anna was uneasy at his being overheard complaining of being hoaxed in state matters. “I am saying no harm of the king; for he loses more than I. If I am hoaxed, he is double-hoaxed, as I could easily prove.” “Could you? Then perhaps,” said Anna, timidly, “perhaps, if you told him so——” “Ay; I could set the case plainly enough before him, if I could see him; but there’s the difficulty.” “I will ask Mr. Durell, and he will ask the Board, I dare say,” exclaimed Anna. “We could say that you would not detain his majesty very long,—not more than half an hour, perhaps.” “Not so much; but I am afraid that would not do. If you consider how many hundreds of people are in prison, or otherwise ruined by the Excise, it seems hardly likely that the king should give half-an-hour to each.” One of the inmates of the apartment, who was keeping himself awake with playing Patience with the dirty cards, while the other dozed, here put in his word. “If his majesty gave his time to every body that is injured by the Excise, there would be no time left for any other business; and you are simple people if you do not know that.”