instances of the financial power of the penny daily saved, and
invested so as to yield its maximum of interest.

If ever his blue eye became animated, it was when he calculated what
would be at the present time the capital produced by a simple penny
placed at five per cent interest the year of the birth of our Saviour.

For him this was sublime. He conceived nothing beyond. One penny!
He wished, he said, he could have lived eighteen hundred years, to
follow the evolutions of that penny, to see it grow tenfold, a
hundred-fold, produce, swell, enlarge, and become, after centuries,
millions and hundreds of millions.

In spite of all, he had, during the early months of his marriage,
allowed his wife to have a young servant. He gave her from time to
time, a five-franc-piece, and took her to the country on Sundays.

This was the honeymoon; and, as he declared himself, this life of
prodigalities could not last.

Under a futile pretext, the little servant was dismissed. He
tightened the strings of his purse. The Sunday excursions were
suppressed.

To mere economy succeeded the niggardly parsimony which counts the
grains of salt in the _pot-au-feu_, which weighs the soap for the
washing, and measures the evening's allowance of candle.

Gradually the accountant took the habit of treating his young wife
like a servant, whose honesty is suspected; or like a child, whose