Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/361

 short rations, starving himself into the bargain; for he cannot bear to eat up all the mouldy fragments of stale bread. In the middle of September he will save up the hash of yesterday; in summer-time he will preserve under seal for to-morrow's dinner a dish of beans, with a bit of mackerel, or half a stinking sprat, counting the leaves of the cut leeks before he puts them away. No beggar from a bridge would accept an invitation to such a meal! But for what end do you pile up riches gathered through torments such as these, when it is plain madness and sheer lunacy to live in want that you may be wealthy when you die? Meantime, while your purse is full to bursting, your love of gain grows as much as the money itself has grown, and the man who has none of it covets it the least. And so when one country house is not enough for you, you buy a second; then you must extend your boundaries, because your neighbour's field seems bigger and better than your own; you must buy that too, and his vineyard, and the hill that is thick and grey with olive-trees. And if no price will persuade the owner to sell, you will send into his green corn by night a herd of lean and tarnished cattle, with wearied necks, who will not come home until they have put the whole crop into their ravenous bellies; no sickle, could make a cleaner job! How many bewail wrongs like these can scarce be told, nor how many fields have been brought to the hammer by such outrages.

But what a talk there will be! How loud the blast of evil rumour! "What harm in that?" you will say: "better keep my peapods for myself than have the praises of the whole country-side if I am to have but a small farm and a miserable crop." 275