All gold from the land of Gold, the unearthed Ophir of the Solomonic time. Everything had a bilious tint. It was as if I was seeing creation through an Oriental topaz. I felt for my ears, lest I had somehow swapped with Midas for his transmuting touch. No railway conductor was ever more clamorous for tickets than my heart was. Gold was 113 that day, so I counted out $5.65, turned it into a Post-office order, and transmitted it to the nearest agent. The ticket came, a strip of paper tawny as the Tiber, a faint reflection of "great heaps of gold," as Clarence said, but not to drown for, as Clarence did. It was covered with "a strange device"—the ticket was—like the handkerchief the Alpine traveler carried in his hand, who talked Latin and cried "Excelsior!"
To think what splendid possibilities might lurk in that oblong piece of paper was enough to take one's breath away! I said not a word to Lucy—that's my wife—but folded it tenderly, as if it were a napkin with ten talents in it, and laid it away with a gold half dollar and a broken ring and a curl of hair and a stray pearl that had tumbled out of an old brooch, and a bit of ribbon and a faint suspicion of dead and gone fragrance—"all and singular" the contents of a little box that, forty years ago, would have been a "till" in the upper right-hand corner of a chest of drawers, and as nearly like an old-fashioned heart as two things can be that are made to hold the same sort of little trinkets of love and memory that everybody else foregoes and forgets.
The ticket lay there a month and I never said a word, but I began to get my money back right away. I tripped up the rounds of the golden ladder every day, and, strange to tell, I was totally unable to stop going up until I reached the top and stood with both feet perched upon "$100,000 in gold." I tried to steady myself a little and be persuaded that $25,000 would be comfortable. I did my best to cultivate a sentiment of respect for $50,000, but the paltry sum sank below the horizon, and like the Spaniard overwhelmed at sight of the sea, who went down upon his knees on Gilboa or somewhere, I saw nothing but the golden ocean of $100,000. And why not? Was not the one quite as easy to get as the other? To be sure, in the glow of my story the capital prize that stood upon its head as a pyramid, has been fashioned into a ladder like Jacob's, with the angels of Imagination and Fancy going up and down thereon, and at last all melted into a sea, has inundated the whole landscape; but I tell you a man with a hundred thousand dollars may defy rhetoric and mixed metaphors with impunity.
I thought I would make my will, and "give and bequeath to my well-beloved wife Lucy" fifty thousand dollars. When I had counted this out by itself, the heap of gold glittered so that it dazzled me out of my discretion, and I asked Lucy, in a quiet way, whether if I had $100,000 in gold and should will her fifty thousand free and clear, it would be enough. She laughed and said she thought it would be liberal! I then told her what I had done. Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given to dreaming. That mother of hers—she is seventy-six if she is a day—will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. She will sit down any time upon a damp bank of crimson and gold cloud that flanks the sunset, and never think of taking cold more than she did forty years ago. She is always seeing faces in the fire, and laying plans that will never be hatched, and altogether has a thousand luxuries that the tax-gatherer can not possibly get into his schedule. Lucy betrays her lineage. When I give her a "ten" sometimes, she will fold her arms, swing slowly to and fro in the rocking-chair, and pay it all out over and over, and get her money's worth in ever so many things useful and beautiful, and the green-backed decimal will be snugly lying all the while in that same box of momentous trifles. I think ten dollars go as far with Lucy as twenty-five do with most people, and by the same sign make her two and a half times as happy.
"Port"—that is the name of my boy—saw not a glimmer of gold for days and days after Lucy had her saffronian vision. He toiled on like Bunyan's fellow with the muck-rake at his calling, nor saw the angel, golden even as a sunflower, that floated overhead. It seemed a pity to wrong him out of his inheritance, and so I told him. I said, "Port, we are a rich family," and showed him the strip of paper. He ticked off the figures slowly, like a clock just running down, 1-0-4-1-6-3, and said—nothing. I thought he lacked gratitude, and so I made a plunge into the dark ages for something to punish him with, and came up with the brand-new fact that ingratitude is a crime so base the ancients never thought it worth while to make a law against it, as nobody, probably, would ever be guilty of it. "Port" went out, and I at once set about erasing the last cypher of the bequest I had made the boy, so that what had read $10,000 became $1,000, and I devised all the rest for the cultivation of gratitude in the human family.
Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, like the strings of David's harp, and October was about done, and the drawing was at hand. But what mattered it all? We had entered into possession already. We had invested one hundred thousand of the prize in the best of securities, and we were receiving eight thousand dollars a year, for you see it was $100,000 in gold, to-wit: $113,000 in greenbacks. We owed no man anything. We had traveled all over the broad domain of Columbus' magnificent "find." We had given two thousand dollars a year to objects of benevolence. We had bought exquisite works of art, and sent a dozen poor painters of good pictures abroad. We had imported rare old English books and strewn them upon our tables and given them to our neighbors. We presented an illustrated copy of "Paradise Lost" to our wood-sawyer one day, a copy reinforced like his breeches, with leather, and he was very grateful, and sat down upon it when he ate his bread and cheese and said it was "good," and we were gratified. We purchased a sober horse and a modest carriage, and propped up the line fence and shingled the kitchen. In a word, the gaunt wolf I had been trying for years to keep away from the door, had been brained at last with a golden club, and his skin lay upon the carriage floor for a foot-robe.
There was a legion of people we wanted to help—a great many of them when we first began, and I told Lucy to get a quire of paper and make a catalogue, but somehow or other they got fewer as we thought about it, until she numbered every one upon her fingers that seemed to have much hold upon our affections. Those I pensioned off in the most liberal manner, and had quite a warm and genial feeling about my heart, as if I had really been beneficent and done something, when I had only been benevolent and wished something. We had two or three wealthy neighbors who had gathered richness as damp logs gather moss, and that was about all there was of it—aggregating golden egg after golden egg, flattening themselves out like an incubating goose ambitious to cover the whole nest, and calling the proceeding "enterprise." I would set these mossy fellows an example that should rebuke them to the tips of their ears. And so I gave twenty thousand dollars for a public library to be free to all residents of the town forever. We had made Christmas "merry" and New Year "happy" for many a heart that would else have had neither one nor the other.
I am glad now to be able to state that there was only one man whom I had the least desire to humble when I became an hundred thousand strong, and he was an insurance agent—a retired doctor, who, growing weary of saving lives with pills, had taken to insuring lives with policies. He was always tormenting me "to insure." He looked me over like an undertaker with a measure in his eye. He kept me constantly reminded of the fact of death, as if it were inevitable. I hardly ever saw him that I did not fancy him rushing around to my widow the next day after I had won the wager, paying her the amount of insurance, and thence away to the printing office with a card flickering in his hand, inscribed with words and figures following, to-wit:
Agent of the So-and-So Insurance Co.:
I thank you for the prompt payment of the sum of $10,000, for which amount you had insured my late husband's life.