"You come to me as one would come to a milch cow, as one would come to a bank in which he had a large deposit."
He put his hand in his breast-pocket and took out a note-case that seemed simply bursting with bank-notes.
"Now if I accommodate you with a five-pound note I must know, at least, what the pressing need is you speak of."
"I want to take a girl up the river, for one thing," answered his nephew, who could no more tell him a lie about the matter, than he could steal a note from that plethoric note-case.
James Hancock replaced the case in his pocket and made a motion with his hands as if to say "that ends everything."
Leavesley rose to go.
"I'd have paid you it back. No matter. I'm going to write a book, and make money out of it. I'll call it the 'Art of Being an Uncle.'"
Hancock made a motion with his hands that said, "Go away, I want to read my letters."
"Now, look here," said Leavesley, with his hand on the door handle, and inspired with another accession of impudence, "if you'd take ten pounds and put it in your pocket, and come with me and her, and have a jolly good day on the river, wouldn't it be better than sitting in this stuffy old office making money that is no use to any one—you can only live once."