A strong leading in this direction
seemed to have been given in the surprising facility of getting
Stone Court, when every one had expected that Mr. Rigg Featherstone
would have clung to it as the Garden of Eden. That was what poor
old Peter himself had expected; having often, in imagination,
looked up through the sods above him, and, unobstructed by.
perspective, seen his frog-faced legatee enjoying the fine
old place to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors!
We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves
are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
The cool and judicious Joshua Rigg had not allowed his parent
to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than the chief good
in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own.
But as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford,
so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold.
He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good,
the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form
by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a moneychanger.
From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport,
he had looked through the windows of the moneychangers as other
boys look through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination
had wrought itself gradually into a deep special passion; he meant,
when he had property, to do many things, one of them being to marry
a genteel young person; but these were all accidents and joys that
imagination could dispense with.
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