Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/216

 VIII.

Be all this as it may, that was my own belief, and it allayed what would otherwise have been a deep regret. No man in this world ever felt a profounder repugnance than Randall for the money-loving spirit, or a more superb disdain for greed of that which has no value but in its uses. The habits of his whole life were totally unchanged to the last, simple, economical, almost parsimonious, utterly averse to pride or love of power or luxury or ostentation of any sort. Neither had he in his constitution the slightest taint of miserliness ; he cared nothing for acquisition except as a bulwark against actual want, and was very generous wherever want was brought to his knowledge. The in- herited fortune of his family, of which he was sole guardian and administrator, was some hundred and fifty thousand dollars ; he left it, in all, nearly a million and a half, and probably had lost quite as much more through the army of railroad-wreckers that preyed on honest investors so re- morselessly after the war. He told of his losses so freely that, until after his death, I constantly feared he might indeed lose all that he had before he died, and lose with it the independence which to him was priceless.

I doubt greatly if he really knew himself, in the later years of his life, how sagaciously he had made his invest- ments in spite of the railroad-wreckers, for more than once he casually remarked to me (never in answer to an in- quiry) : " I shall make no will. The law makes the best will. Belinda will have everything, and she will need it all — all ! " Absurd as this was, he believed it so evidently that I supposed he had lost all but a small competency.

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