One of the saddest pictures in all history is the first mention that is made of money. Sarah was dead, and Abraham was sojourning among strangers in a strange land. He mourned for his wife, and stood up before the sons of Heth, and begged of them to intercede with Ephron, the Hittite, for the cave of Machpelah, as a burial place. Ephron liberally offered him the cave and the field, but the patriarch insisted upon payment; whereupon the Hittite answered: 'My lord, hearken unto me; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? Bury, therefore, thy dead.' Abraham weighed the 'four hundred shekels of silver current (money) with the merchant,' and the field and the trees and the caves were Abraham's, and Sarah was buried. The first use of money is the last, and the cave of Machpelah, typical of the last resting place of all men, is the most important because the most imperative use of money. He that hoards and he that squanders, Croesus and Lazarus, at the end of life, provided they have money enough to purchase their caves of Machpelah, have fortune enough, and more than enough, for they may not carry gold and silver with them through the valley of the Shadow. We buy and sell, we loan and speculate, we hoard our shining wealth as Croesus hoarded the golden sands of Pactolus in the treasury of Delhi, but when we come to the cave of Machpelah, we leave it at the entrance, and go into the darkness unencumbered. The earliest and standard specimen of Roman coinage was the _as_, subdivided almost indefinitely, and originally weighing a pound. This ponderous coin subserved a purpose which our penny does to-day. It had upon the obverse the double-headed Janus, and upon the reverse the keel of a ship, rudely done, but answering the requirements of the light, juvenile gambling known as pitching coppers. _Capita aut navem_, 'Heads or the ship,' the Roman boys cried, as Young America cries now, 'Heads or tails.' It is an eminently conservative custom, and Master Freddy, as he tosses his new bronze cent, may summarily answer paternal reproof by showing that Master Tullius, two thousand years ago, pitched the _as_ his father coined, and, for aught we know, grew to be a wise emperor and a great man. Judea is represented upon several coins of the time of Titus and Vespasian by the figure of a woman with flowing hair and bared breasts, seated upon the ground in a posture of sorrow and captivity, above her the wide-spreading branches of the palm, and behind her a stalwart Roman soldier in mail, leaning upon his spear. Thus exactly did the Roman engraver follow out upon these coins the language of the Scriptures. The Psalmist describes this posture in the lamentations of the Jews over their captivity. 'By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.' Still more remarkable is it that the prophet, in a passage foretelling this identical captivity, likens Judea to a woman sitting upon the ground wrapped in sorrow.