THE HOG : THE MISEE. 
231 
with the miser, who is not ashamed of wallowing in baseness and 
in usury to increase his treasure, and who finds no speculation in- 
famous when there is profit to be made by it. 
The Emperor Vespasian said, in relation to the tax that went by 
his name, that money had no smell. The same answer is attribu- 
ted to Henry IV. in analogous circumstances. 
The gluttony of the hog, and the violence of his other carnal 
appetites, tell the nature of those enjoyments that belong to the 
temperament of the miser. The sow devours her little ones ; it is 
the greedy mother who sells the charms of her daughter, who 
sells her before the notary to an old man, and thus fattens on her 
flesh. Avarice has also, however, its good side. Avarice is the 
immoderate love of conservation, ag prodigality is the disorderly 
love of expense. Humanity has an immense interest that none of 
the elements of its riches should disappear before having furnished 
the full sum of the services or enjoyments that it contained. 
Now there are about the dwellings of humanity great quantities 
of broken glass bottles, rusty nails, and candle ends, which v/ould 
be completely lost to society if some careful and intelligent hand 
did not charge itself with the collection of all tliese valueless relics, 
to reconstruct out of them a mass susceptible of being worked 
over and restored to consumption. Tliis important office evidently 
enters into the attributes of the miser. The miser gladly stoops 
to pick up the button or the pin which the rest of humanity treads 
under foot. We have here no longer the usurer or vampire that 
sucks the heart’s blood of a poor family of artisans, that enriches 
himself by their ruin. It is no longer the infamous stockjobber 
w^ho fabricates news of the exchange, and bets on a certainty ; 
here the character and the mission of tlie miser perceptibly rise — 
the grip-cent becomes the scavenger. 
Now what industry is more honorable than that of the scaven- 
ger ! of the scavenger w^ho collects remnants, analyzes filth, and 
protects the social wealth against tb.e carfilessness of servants, and 
the wastefulness of slovenly housekeeping. As the scavenger util- 
izes for society the dirt-piles of cities, reviving dead paper, and 
converting the fragments of glass into splendid lustres, of which 
he makes little use on his own account ; thus the hog utilizes the 
