“These were Uncle Lemuel’s,” she explained to Ruth, touching the dog’s-eared books. “His diaries. It does seem as though he loved to put down on paper all his miserly thoughts and accounts of his very meanest acts. He must have been a strange combination of business acumen and simple-mindedness.”
“I wish for your sake, Mrs. Eland,” Ruth said, “that he had kept to the very day of his death the riches he once accumulated.”
“Oh! I wish so, too—for Teeny’s sake,” replied Mrs. Eland, referring to her unfortunate sister by the pet name she had called her in childhood.
“Are these the books and papers Mr. Bob Buckham brought you from the Quoharie poorhouse, where Mr. Aden died?”
“Yes. I have never read through the diaries. I only wanted to find an account of the five hundred dollars belonging to Mr. Buckham’s father that my father turned over to Uncle Lemuel.
“But here are notes of really vast sums. Uncle Lemuel must have really been quite beside himself long before he died. In one place he writes about drawing out of several banks sums aggregating over fifty thousand dollars.
“Think of it!” and Mrs. Eland sighed. “It was at the time of the panic. He speaks of being distrustful of banks. So he drew out all he had. But, of course, he did not have so much money as that. Fifty thousand dollars!”
“Perhaps he did have it,” said Ruth.
“Then what became of it? He writes in one place of losing a hundred dollars in some transaction, and he goes on about it, in a raving way, as though it was every cent of money he ever owned,” declared Mrs. Eland. “Oh, dear! What a terrible thing it must be to be a miser.”
“But—but suppose he did have so much money at one time?”