'He was poor, though, wasn't he, father?'

'Poverty is but a small thing, Effie, and in our land of equal laws and
charitable institutions, very few suffer from absolute want, but that
old man was richer (in gold and silver I mean) than I am.'

'What! and lived in that dreadful place, father?'

'Oh! I see it,' exclaimed Harry; 'he is a miser.'

'Yes, Harry,' returned Mr Maurice, 'you are right, the love of money is
the cause of all his misery. He came to this city a great many years
ago, (he could not himself tell how many, for his memory evidently
wavered,) and commenced business as a linen draper. He had one only
daughter then, and he lavished all his earnings on her at first, but
finally she married, and from that time he became wholly engrossed with
self. He was never very fond of show, and so did not become a
spendthrift, but he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up
all his savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he
retired from business, but the passion clung to him with all the
tenacity of a long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was
known to all the young profligates, the bad young men who throng our
city, and became as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in
former days to the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me
frightful stories, my children, of tyranny and fraud, of ruined young
men led on by him till they committed self-murder, of old men shorn of
their fortunes through his ingenious villainy--'

'O father!' exclaimed little Effie, covering her eyes with her hands.