PETER GOLDTHWAITE'S TREASURE.
"And so, Peter, you won't even consider of the business?" said Mr. John
Brown, buttoning his surtout over the snug rotundity of his person and drawing
on his gloves. "You positively refuse to let me have this crazy old house, and the
land under and adjoining, at the price named?"
"Neither at that, nor treble the sum," responded the gaunt, grizzled and
threadbare Peter Goldthwaite. "The fact is, Mr. Brown, you must find another
site for your brick block and be content to leave my estate with the present
owner. Next summer I intend to put a splendid new mansion over the cellar of
the old house."
"Pho, Peter!" cried Mr. Brown as he opened the kitchen door; "content
yourself with building castles in the air, where house-lots are cheaper than on
earth, to say nothing of the cost of bricks and mortar. Such foundations are solid
enough for your edifices, while this underneath us is just the thing for mine; and
so we may both be suited. What say you, again?"
"Precisely what I said before, Mr. Brown," answered Peter Goldthwaite.
"And, as for castles in the air, mine may not be as magnificent as that sort of
architecture, but perhaps as substantial, Mr. Brown, as the very respectable brick
block with dry-goods stores, tailors' shops and banking-rooms on the lower
floor, and lawyers' offices in the second story, which you are so anxious to
substitute."
"And the cost, Peter? Eh?" said Mr. Brown as he withdrew in something of a
pet. "That, I suppose, will be provided for off-hand by drawing a check on
Bubble Bank?"
John Brown and Peter Goldthwaite had been jointly known to the commercial
world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm of Goldthwaite &
Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily dissolved by the natural
incongruity of its constituent parts. Since that event, John Brown, with exactly
the qualities of a thousand other John Browns, and by just such plodding
methods as they used, had prospered wonderfully and become one of the
wealthiest John Browns on earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after