"'Miserable race!' said the father flea, with his beautiful bright eye shining pitifully upon Jericho; 'miserable, craving race, you hear, my son! Man in his greed never knows when he has wherewithal. He gorges to gluttony; he drinks to drunkenness; and you heard this wretched fool who prayed to Heaven to turn him--heart, brain, and all--into a lump of money.'" How the operation was effected may be learnt from Mr. Jerrold's book. One result of it was a most troubled and miserable night to the dreamer Jericho, whose complaints to his wife when he awoke met with no sympathy. "'If I were to live a thousand years, I shouldn't forget last night!' groaned Jericho. "'Very likely not,' said Mrs. Jericho; 'I've no doubt you deserve to remember it. I shouldn't wonder----'" Mrs. Jericho's want of money is intensified by the wants of her son Basil, whose luck at billiards may have failed him just when his creditors were most pressing. "'Well, what does the old fellow say, the scaly old griffin? What's he got to answer for himself?'" This was "the sudden question put to Mrs. Jericho on her return to the drawing-room, after the interview with her husband. 'Come, what is it? Will he give me some money? In a word,' asked young hopeful, 'will he go into the melting-pot, like a man and a father?' "'My dear Basil, you mustn't ask me,' replied Mrs. Jericho. "'Oh, mustn't I, though!' cried Basil. 'Ha, you don't know the lot of people that's asking me; bless you, they ask a hundred times to my once!'" The Jerichos have some rich friends, the Carraways, who live in a mansion called Jogtrot Hall, "the one central grandeur, the boast and the comfort of the village of Marigolds." To a fête at the Hall comes an invitation to the Jerichos. It had always been Mrs. Jericho's ambition that her girls should--"in her own nervous words"--make a blow in marriage, and she felt that perhaps the time had come. But the girls' dresses--the "war-paint," as Mr. Basil put it--there was the difficulty, only to be surmounted by Mr. Jericho's yielding to the repeated cry, "When will you let me have some money?" With but faint hopes of success, Mrs. Jericho seeks her husband in his study. In a long colloquy, she urges the importance of her daughters' appearance at this "grand party," and the necessity for an advance to enable them to do so properly. Mr. Jericho turns a deaf ear to her appeal, till suddenly a wonderful change comes over him. "Quite a new look of satisfaction gleamed from his eyes, and his mouth had such a strange smile of compliance! What could ail him?" The charm was working, the marvellous change was in operation. Mrs. Jericho fears for her husband's sanity. "'He doesn't look mad,' thought Mrs. Jericho, a little anxious. "'I feel as if I had got new blood, new flesh, new bones, new brain! Wonderful!' Jericho trod up and down the room and snapt his fingers. 'Something's going to happen,' said he."