only one penny a pound, they could live almost for nothing; and Uriah thought they could wait and maintain themselves for years, if necessary. So from time to time, one tale of urgent staring distress or another lured him on to take fresh bargains, till he saw himself almost penniless. Things still remained as dead as the very stones or the stumps around them. My brother Uriah began to feel very melancholy; and Mrs. Tattenhall, who had so strongly advised the wholesale purchase of property, looked very serious. Uriah often thought: "Ah! she would do it; but—bless her! I will never say so, for she did it for the best." But his boys and girls were growing apace, and made him think. "Bless me! In a few years they will be shooting up into men and women; and if this speculation should turn out all moonshine!—if the place should never revive!"
He sat one day on the stump of a tree on high ground, looking over the bay. His mind was in the most gloomy, dejected condition. Everything looked dark and hopeless. No evidence of returning life around; no spring in the commercial world; and his good money gone; as he sat thus, his eyes fixed on the distance, his mind sunk in the lowering present, a man came up, and asked him to take his land off his hands : to take it, for Heaven's sake, and save his starving family.
"Man!" said Uriah, with a face and a voice so savage that it made the suppliant start even in his misery, "I have no money! I want no land! I have too much land. You shall have it all for as much as will carry me back to England, and set me down a beggar there!"
The man shook his head. "If I had a single crown I would not ask you : but my wife is down of the fever, and my children are dying of dysentery. What shall I do? and my lots are the very best in the place."
"I tell you!" said my brother Uriah, with a fierce growl, and an angry flash of the eye, "I have no money, and how can I buy?" He glanced at the man in fury; but a face so full of patient suffering and of sickness—sickness of the heart, of the soul, and, as it were of famine, met his gaze, that he stopped short, felt a pang of remorse for his anger, and pointing to a number of bullocks gazing in the valley below, he said, in a softened tone, "Look there! The
