LXXX.

THE STREAM OF CASH.

A certain gentleman’s servant was one day in his master’s garden, when he beheld a stream of cash[81] flowing by, two or three feet in breadth and of about the same depth. He immediately seized two large handfuls, and then threw himself down on the top of the stream in order to try and secure the rest. However, when he got up he found that it had all flowed away from under him, none being left except what he had got in his two hands.

[“Ah!” says the commentator, “money is properly a circulating medium, and is not intended for a man to lie upon and keep all to himself.”][82]

FOOTNOTES:

[81] See No. II., note 42.

[82] The Chinese, fond as they are of introducing water, under the form of miniature lakes, into their gardens and pleasure-grounds, do not approve of a running stream near the dwelling-house. I myself knew a case of a man, provided with a pretty little house, rent free, alongside of which ran a mountain-rill, who left the place and paid for lodgings out of his own pocket rather than live so close to a stream which he averred _carried all his good luck away_. Yet this man was a fair scholar and a graduate to boot.