and most uncomfortably to the family expenses--in tallow candles.
For a while Aleck was worried. Then, after a little, she ceased
to worry, for the occasion of it was gone. She was pained,
she was grieved, she was ashamed; but she said nothing, and so became
an accessory. Sally was taking candles; he was robbing the store.
It is ever thus. Vast wealth, to the person unaccustomed to it,
is a bane; it eats into the flesh and bone of his morals.
When the Fosters were poor, they could have been trusted with
untold candles. But now they--but let us not dwell upon it.
From candles to apples is but a step: Sally got to taking apples;
then soap; then maple-sugar; then canned goods; then crockery.
How easy it is to go from bad to worse, when once we have started upon a
downward course!

Meantime, other effects had been milestoning the course of the Fosters'
splendid financial march. The fictitious brick dwelling had
given place to an imaginary granite one with a checker-board
mansard roof; in time this one disappeared and gave place to a
still grander home--and so on and so on. Mansion after mansion,
made of air, rose, higher, broader, finer, and each in its turn
vanished away; until now in these latter great days, our dreamers
were in fancy housed, in a distant region, in a sumptuous vast
palace which looked out from a leafy summit upon a noble prospect
of vale and river and receding hills steeped in tinted mists
--and all private, all the property of the dreamers; a palace swarming
with liveried servants, and populous with guests of fame and power,
hailing from all the world's capitals, foreign and domestic.

This palace was far, far away toward the rising sun, immeasurably remote,
astronomically remote, in Newport, Rhode Island, Holy Land