All his life, since ever he had had business, Mr. Crathie had prided himself on his honesty, and was therefore in one of the most dangerous moral positions a man could occupy--ruinous even to the honesty itself. Asleep in the mud, he dreamed himself awake on a pedestal. At best, such a man is but perched on a needlepoint when he thinketh he standeth. Of him who prided himself on his honor I should expect that one day, in the long run it might be, he would do some vile thing. Not, probably, within the small circle of illumination around his wretched rushlight; but in the great region beyond it, of what to him is a moral darkness or twilight vague, he may be or may become capable of doing a deed that will stink in the nostrils of the universe; and in his own when he knows it as it is. The honesty in which a man can pride himself must be a small one, for mere honesty will never think of itself at all. The limited honesty of the factor clave to the interests of his employers, and let the rights he encountered take care of themselves. Those he dealt with were to him rather as enemies than friends--not enemies to be prayed for, but to be spoiled. Malcolm's doctrine of honesty in horse-dealing was to him ludicrously new. His notion of honesty in that kind was to cheat the buyer for his master if he could, proud to write in his book a large sum against the name of the animal. He would have scorned in his very soul the idea of making a farthing by it himself through any business quirk whatever, but he would not have been the least ashamed if, having sold Kelpie, he had heard--let me say after a week of possession--that she had dashed out her purchaser's brains. He would have been a little shocked, a little sorry perhaps, but nowise ashamed. "By this time," he would have said, "the man ought to have been up to her, and either taken care of himself or _sold her again_"--to dash out another man's brains instead!