“But if there is more money, sir, that ought to make us all more comfortable.” This was said by the Frau to Mr. Cartwright a few days after her return from Innsbruck, and was a reply to a statement made by him. She had listened to advice from Hoff the butcher, and now she was listening to advice from her guest. He had told her that these troubles of hers had come from the fact that gold had become more{80} plentiful¹ in the world than heretofore, or rather from that other fact that she had refused to accommodate herself to this increased plenty of gold. Then had come her very natural suggestion, “If there is more money that ought to make us all more comfortable.”

“Not at all, Frau Frohmann.”

“Well, sir!” Then she paused, not wishing to express an unrestrained praise of wealth, and so to appear too worldly-minded, but yet feeling that he certainly was wrong according to the clearly expressed opinion of the world.

“Not at all. Though you had your barn and your stores filled with gold, you could not make your guests comfortable with that. They could not eat it, nor drink it, nor sleep upon it, nor delight themselves with looking at it as we do at the waterfall, or at the mill up yonder.”

“But I could buy all those things for them.”

“Ah, if you could buy them! That’s just the question. But if everybody had gold so common, if all the barns were full of it, then people would not care to take it for their meat and wine.”

“It never can be like that, surely.”

“There is no knowing; probably not. But it is a question of degree. When you have your hay-crop here very plentiful, don’t you find that hay becomes cheap?”

“That’s of course.”

“And gold becomes cheap. You just think it over, and you’ll find how it is. When hay is plentiful, you{81} can’t get so much for a load because it becomes cheap. But you can feed more cows, and altogether you know that such plenty is a blessing². So it is with gold. When it is plentiful, you can’t get so much meat for it as you used to do; but, as you can get the gold much easier, it will come to the same thing,—if you will swim with the stream, as your friend in Innsbruck counselled you.”

Then the Frau again considered, and again found that she could not accept this doctrine³ as bearing upon her own case. “I don’t think it can be like that here, sir,” she said.

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