Farina

Farina

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Farina
by George Meredith #98 in our series by George Meredith
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Title: Farina
Author: George Meredith
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4492] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 5,
2002]
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FARINA
By George Meredith
THE WHITE ROSE CLUB
In those lusty ages when the Kaisers lifted high the golden goblet of
Aachen, and drank, elbow upward, the green-eyed wine of old romance,
there lived, a bow-shot from the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins
and the Three Holy Kings, a prosperous Rhinelander, by name Gottlieb

Groschen, or, as it was sometimes ennobled, Gottlieb von Groschen;
than whom no wealthier merchant bartered for the glory of his ancient
mother- city, nor more honoured burgess swallowed impartially red
juice and white under the shadow of his own fig-tree.
Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in
the roll of Gottlieb's possessions; corn-acres below Cologne; basalt-
quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the Romans
to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He could
have bought up every hawking crag, owner and all, from Hatto's Tower
to Rheineck. Lore-ley, combing her yellow locks against the
night-cloud, beheld old Gottlieb's rafts endlessly stealing on the
moonlight through the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful
host were the wives of his raftsmen widowed there by her watery
music!
This worthy citizen of Cologne held vasty manuscript letters of the
Kaiser addressed to him:
'Dear Well-born son and Subject of mine, Gottlieb!' and he was easy
with the proudest princes of the Holy German Realm. For Gottlieb was
a money- lender and an honest man in one body. He laid out for the
plenteous harvests of usury, not pressing the seasons with too much
rigour. 'I sow my seed in winter,' said he, 'and hope to reap good profit
in autumn; but if the crop be scanty, better let it lie and fatten the soil.'
'Old earth's the wisest creditor,' he would add; 'she never squeezes the
sun, but just takes what he can give her year by year, and so makes sure
of good annual interest.'
Therefore when people asked Gottlieb how he had risen to such a
pinnacle of fortune, the old merchant screwed his eye into its wisest
corner, and answered slyly, 'Because I 've always been a student of the
heavenly bodies'; a communication which failed not to make the orbs
and systems objects of ardent popular