plying those invaluable fins, made off as fast as they could, plunging
into the mud, hiding themselves under rocks and coral banks. Metaphor
apart, the capitalists buttoned up their pockets, and would have nothing
to say to their namesake.

Not a word of this change, so abhorrent to all the notions of poor
Augustine Caxton, had been breathed to him by Peck or Tibbets. He ate
and slept and worked at the Great Book, occasionally wondering why he had
not heard of the advent of the "Literary Times," unconscious of all the
awful responsibilities which "The Capitalist" was entailing on him,
knowing no more of "The Capitalist" than he did of the last loan of the
Rothschilds.

Difficult was it for all other human nature, save my father's, not to
breathe an indignant anathema on the scheming head of the brother-in-law
who had thus violated the most sacred obligations of trust and kindred,
and so entangled an unsuspecting recluse. But, to give even Jack Tibbets
his due, he had firmly convinced himself that "The Capitalist" would make
my father's fortune; and if he did not announce to him the strange and
anomalous development into which the original sleeping chrysalis of the
"Literary Times" had taken portentous wing, it was purely and wholly in
the knowledge that my father's "prejudices," as he termed them, would
stand in the way of his becoming a Creesus. And, in fact, Uncle Jack had
believed so heartily in his own project that he had put himself
thoroughly into Mr. Peck's power, signed bills, in his own name, to some
fabulous amount, and was actually now in the Fleet, whence his
penitential and despairing confession was dated, arriving simultaneously
with a short letter from Mr. Peck, wherein that respectable printer
apprised my father that he had continued, at his own risk, the
publication of "The Capitalist" as far as a prudent care for his family