"You had better not. You will soon be investing the money, no doubt, so that there will be no occasion. I would pay off the mortgage if I were you."
"It wouldn't seem as if I had the money at all if I did that. Besides, the squire says he will find an investment for me."
"Meanwhile I hope you won't be as foolish as a man I was reading of the other day, living in Vermont."
"How was that?"
"He put a hundred dollars in an air tight stove for safe keeping. He was afraid his wife would see it and want to spend it if he put it in a trunk or bureau drawer. As it turned out, he had better have taken his wife into his confidence. Not knowing that the stove was doing service as a bank, she kindled a fire in it one damp day, and that was the last of the hundred dollars."
"I don't think I shall put the money in the stove, though it is June," said Adin Dunham. "Besides, my wife knows all about it, and she isn't one of the spendin' kind."
"That is lucky for you. Well, here is a pile of fifty-dollar bills—twenty of them. I will count them before you, so that you may see they are all right, and then you may give me a receipt."
So the thousand dollars were counted out, and Adin Dunham put them into his capacious pocket, which perhaps in its history of five years had never contained in the aggregate so large a sum of money.
The carpenter breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction. The moment he had so long anticipated had arrived, and he carried with him a sum which seemed to him a fortune, all his, and all to be disposed of as he willed. He straightened up unconsciously, for he felt that he had become a person of importance.
He jumped into his buggy, and when he had finished his errands in Rockmount, he started in the direction of home.