 that the flavour is unpleasant in spite of excellent ingredients; and a
fine systematic stinginess may be accompanied with a seasoning that quite spoils
its relish. Now, good Mr. Glegg himself was stingy in the most amiable manner:
his neighbours called him »near,« which always means that the person in question
is a lovable skinflint. If you expressed a preference for cheese-parings, Mr.
Glegg would remember to save them for you, with a good-natured delight in
gratifying your palate, and he was given to pet all animals which required no
appreciable keep. There was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr. Glegg: his eyes
would have watered with true feeling over the sale of a widow's furniture, which
a five-pound note from his side-pocket would have prevented; but a donation of
five pounds to a person »in a small way of life« would have seemed to him a mad
kind of lavishness rather than »charity,« which had always presented itself to
him as a contribution of small aids, not a neutralising of misfortune. And Mr.
Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his own: he would have
ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his expenses were to be paid for
him, as when they were to come out of his own pocket, and was quite zealous in
trying to induce indifferent acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for
blacking. This inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the
industrious men of business of a former generation, who made their fortunes
slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to the harrier - it
constituted them a »race,« which is nearly lost in these days of rapid
money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back of want. In old-fashioned
times, an »independence« was hardly ever made without a little miserliness as a
condition, and you would have found that quality in every provincial district,
combined with characters as various as the fruits from which we can extract
acid. The true Harpagons were always marked and exceptional characters: not so
the worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched from real necessity, retained
even in the midst of their comfortable retirement, with their wall-fruit and
wine-bins, the habit of regarding life as an ingenious process of nibbling out
one's livelihood without leaving any perceptible deficit, and who would have
been as immediately prompted to give up a newly-taxed luxury when they had their
clear five hundred a-year, as when they had only
