On the top lay an envelope addressed to him in Trina's handwriting.

He opened it and read, "For my dear Mac's birthday, from Trina;" and below, in a kind of post-script, "The man will be round to-morrow to put it in place." McTeague tore away the excelsior.
Suddenly he uttered an exclamation.
It was the Tooth--the famous golden molar with its huge prongs--his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life; and it was French gilt, too, not the cheap German gilt that was no good.

Ah, what a dear little woman was this Trina, to keep so quiet, to remember his birthday! "Ain't she--ain't she just a--just a JEWEL," exclaimed McTeague under his breath, "a JEWEL--yes, just a JEWEL; that's the word." Very carefully he removed the rest of the excelsior, and lifting the ponderous Tooth from its box, set it upon the marble-top centre table.
How immense it looked in that little room! The thing was tremendous, overpowering--the tooth of a gigantic fossil, golden and dazzling.
Beside it everything seemed dwarfed.

Even McTeague himself, big boned and enormous as he was, shrank and dwindled in the presence of the monster.

As for an instant he bore it in his hands, it was like a puny Gulliver struggling with the molar of some vast Brobdingnag.
The dentist circled about that golden wonder, gasping with delight and stupefaction, touching it gingerly with his hands as if it were something sacred.