University of Virginia Library

1. FIRST INSTALLMENT.

For twenty years at least I had been in the habit of
putting myself to sleep by imagining what I would do
with the precise sum of fifty millions of dollars. An
excellent hypnotic I found it, with no morphine or
chloral after-effects. It may have unfitted me for the
hard grind of actual life, but no matter now. When it
came I was as tranquil as a May morning. The fact is,
the transfer was not completed until the close of the
month of May, 1876. Negotiations, etc., had been going
on for months beforehand, and it has always been a
matter of inordinate pride to me that I attended to my
regular duties and kept the whole thing a profound secret
from my family, friends, and, indeed, everybody in
America—the money having come from Hindostan. It
required a deal of innocent lying to do this, but secrecy
was indispensable to the surprises I meditated, and a
surprise, you know, is the very cream of the delight as
well of giving as receiving.

One of the bankers, a Calcutta man, if I remember
rightly, had the good sense, on taking leave, to put into
my hands a small box filled with gold-pieces, so that I
might feel my wealth right away and have no doubts
about it. The party left on the nine o'clock Fredericksburg

train, and, after bidding them good-by at the hotel, I put
a handful of money in my pocket and walked out to get
a little fresh air. My wife always interprets this to mean
a glass of beer, but she was mistaken in this instance.
Besides, she was up the country at the time.

I went straight to Gerot's, ordered a nice little supper
to be sent to a room up-stairs which I engaged for the
night, and with the supper a bottle of his best champagne,
a bundle of his finest cigars (I found I did not
want a whole box), a quire of foolscap, pens, and ink.
Then I walked down to the telegraph-office.

On the way a number of acquaintances greeted me,
and I wondered to myself whether the tone of their voices
(they were not uncourteous at all) would have been different
if they had known how much money I was worth.
A few months later my wonder was quieted.

The reason I went to the telegraph-office was this:
Years and years before, my friend, Calvin D. Jones, had
said to me,—

“If I should ever become suddenly very rich, do you
know what I would do?”

“No,” I replied.

“I should run as hard as I could stave and give away
every dollar I could persuade myself to give, for if I
stopped one second to think about it I should never give
one cent.”

By that I knew that Jones was a man of intellect.

He then lived in Rome, Georgia, and was drugging
people there. I telegraphed him to draw on me for
expenses, and meet me as early as possible in Lynchburg.

That done, I returned to Gerot's.

My supper, as nice a one as heart could wish, was all
ready for me in my room. How often and over again
my appetite had been whetted for that identical supper!
and now there it was before me, the gold in my pocket,
the wine, the cigars, paper and pens, all as I had imagined
a thousand times.

And what think you was the result?

A loss of appetite?

Not that exactly, but an intense honing for ashcake
and buttermilk.

Gerot had neither, and it was too late to get them elsewhere;
so I drank a glass or two of wine, and addressed
myself to the task of writing out minutely what I intended
to do with my money. The plan was in my head, complete
and clear, and, once written down, my purpose was
to carry it out to the very letter.

I had not finished the first page before I stopped suddenly,
threw down the pen, and groaned aloud in such
anguish of spirit as I had never felt before; for never
before had I felt so crushing a sense of poverty.

“My God!” I cried, “what can a man do with a
miserable pittance of fifty millions? I want to give
Virginia a perfect system of county roads, so that one
may get off at a station and go to the nearest country-house
without breaking his neck, and it would take five
hundred millions to do that. Then there is the capitol—
to fix that and its surroundings as I would like to have
them fixed would consume the last dollar in my possession.
Bah!”

That bah! was intoned more like an oath than an
introit. I rose and paced the room for an hour or more
in mingled rage and misery. Then I drank the rest of
the wine (it would not keep, in fact, was flat already), put
a cigar in my pocket (“maybe Gerot will take the others
back—a pipe is plenty good enough for me, suits my
weak digestion”[1] ), and walked out.

Day was just faintly dawning.

Putting a chew of tobacco in my mouth and saving my
cigar for after breakfast, I strode furiously up the tow-path
of the canal, exclaiming aloud, as I went along,—

“I must be rich! I will be rich! I will pinch and
screw, and save and shave, and skin until I get some
money. I will go into Wall Street, join a railroad ring,
get elected to Congress—do anything to make a fortune.
I will invest, I will buy town-lots in Manchester—I must
make money. I want a hundred million, two hundred
million, as much as Astor, Vanderbilt, and Stewart combined,
and I will have it. Yes, a thousand, two thousand,
millions of dollars. I will flood the South with money.

Set every industry humming, restock every plantation,
buy up every negro legislature, buy Congress, buy Grant
bodily; my people shall not, no, by the gods! they shall
not suffer any longer.”

A thought struck me like a blow from a catapult.

“Suppose you do all this, and in Persia and India tens
of thousands are perishing from starvation. The world is
too big for you. You cannot be God.”

Miserable, yea, the miserablest of living men, I bowed
myself down where I stood and actually wept with wrath
and mortification.

Just then a sweet breeze sprang up, the waves began to
clap their hands, the song of the river, which I had not
heard before, mingled with the soft tones of the wind and
the orisons of the birds, the heavens above me flushed
with the love-light of expectation at the sun's coming,
and aloft and alow and around was the ineffable loveliness
and peace of morning in its prime. Suddenly there came
from thicket, or copse, or the distant forest, I could not
tell where, a “wood-note wild” of some bird I had not
heard for half a century nearly, and in an instant the
beauty, the mystery, the holiness of nature came back to
me just as it came in childhood when sometimes my playmates
left me alone in the great orchard of my home in
Cumberland.

From cursing and moaning I fell to adoring. My soul,
full of gratitude, could find only the simplest expression.

“Thank God! I can do some good; and I will.”

My short but deep thanksgiving ended, I gave myself
up wholly to the dewy beauty and freshness around me,
and cried out, in rapture,—

“Oh, my mother, my mother, my mother! my foster-mother!
the only mother I ever knew! all these long,
long, long years have I been cooped up in sanctums, in
libraries, in all sorts of dens of houses, pining for you,
with your bright face in full view across the water or over
the hill yonder, but no chance to come to you except for
a moment only. And now, now, O Father of Earth, I
can come back to you—that is one blessedness of riches.
Back, never, never, never more to be parted from you
till, sinner that I am, I go to heaven.”

I trust there is no good business man within the reading
of my print who will not say with considerable emphasis
that I made a sufficient sentimental ass of myself. At any
rate, from that hour I have never had any further trouble
with myself, never desired to be inordinately rich, but
have been perfectly content to struggle on with my pitiful
fifty millions and do the best I could.

It being now broad daylight, I turned homewards, and,
as I did so, my thoughts took another turn.

“Moses, old fellow,” said I to myself, “you and I are
going to have a good time. The way we are going to
find some pretty stream in the depths of the woods, and
spend the livelong day by its side enjoying the clear, running
water (just as we did in Princeton at Stony Brook,
before we ever dreamed of the protoxide of hydrogen),
and the blue heavens shining through the tall tree-tops,
before Old Probabilities, drot him! was born, and we
ever knew anything or cared anything about atmospheric
waves, the nebula hypothesis, or any such foolishness, is
the way. Won't we consecrate a day, yea, many days,
every recurring season to the worship of nature, just as
you and I and William Christian[2] used to do ever so
many years ago in Lynchburg? I just tell you, my son,
we are going to have the finest, the tip-toppest-A-Number-Onest
kind of a time. Why, sir, we'll—”

In a trance of delight at the pleasure in store for me, I
had wandered several feet below the level of the tow-path.
An enormous black bolide, as it seemed to me, fell upon
me from the skies, and consciousness left me.

When I came to myself I was lying on the deck of a
freight-boat, receiving such attention as the ignorant captain
could give. The bolide proved to be only a mule,
which had broken a rotten tow-line and tumbled down
the canal-bank, stunning me as he passed. A fracture of
the shoulder-blade and a few severe bruises were soon
patched up by Dr. Coleman after my return to the city,
so that I took the ten o'clock train on the Danville road
as if nothing had happened.

Jones came promptly to Lynchburg, and refused flatly
to believe in my fifty millions, but being convinced,
mounted a horse and proceeded day after day to scour
the country around the town, to the bewilderment of the
citizens. Such was his zest, and so heartily did he enter
into my plans, that he kept me up every night till one or
two o'clock, suggesting, altering, and greatly improving
the hints I had originally given him. During the day-time
I had a trying experience. Forced to keep quiet,
while the money burned in my pocket, I was dreadfully
bored.[3]

At length Jones came back one night in triumph—he
had found, not what he wanted exactly, but the best that
could be had.

“I can fix all the rest,” said he, after having given me
a minute account of the topography.

Tom Kirkpatrick[4] was called in the very next morning,
the lawyer's part of the business intrusted to him,
and having furnished these friends of my early manhood
with work that would occupy them a long time (Jones
particularly), and pay them well, I hurried back to Richmond.
Ad. Williams and J. L. Apperson[5] laughed in
my face at first, but in due time they became convinced,
as Jones had been, and promised me to make the necessary
purchases as adroitly and cheaply as under the circumstances
was possible. And they were as good as their
word. They did their duty quickly, that is to say, within
a few months, and at much less cost than I had counted
upon. I had to be economical, and I will say here that
few if any of my agents ever pleased me more than
Williams & Apperson.

It was half a year before Jones and Kirkpatrick completed
their work, a peculiar obstacle intervening.[6] Six
months of torture mingled with pleasure (knowing what

was to come) to me. My family and friends upbraided
me for my long-continued idleness, while everybody
wondered how I made buckle and tongue meet. I did
it though, and am proud I did not overdo the thing.
Money was a little, very little, bit more plentiful at my
house, and my wife, satisfied that I did not gamble,[7]
convinced herself that I had drawn a prize in the Louisville
Library Lottery. She had a notion, too, that I had
found a gold-mine. [A great calamity to a Buckingham
man.] What else could make me spend whole days by
my lone self in the woods? She was certain of it.