To say ANYTHING is too small to matter, is of the devil; to say anything is too great to forgive, is not of God.

He who would soonest die to divide evil and his fellows, will be the readiest to make for them all HONEST excuse.
Cosmo liked best to hear Mr.Burns talk about precious stones.
There he was great, for he had a passion for them, and Cosmo was more than ready to be infected with it.

By the hour together would he discourse of them; now on the different and comparative merits of individual stones which had at one time and another passed through his hands, and on the way they were cut, or ought to have been cut; now on the conditions of size, shape, and water, as indicating the special best way of cutting them; now on the various settings, as bringing out the qualities of different kinds and differing stones.
One day he came upon the subject of the weather in relation to stones: on such a sort of day you ought to buy this or that kind of stone; on such another you must avoid buying this or that kind, and seek rather to sell.
Up to this moment, and the mention of this last point, Cosmo had believed Mr.Burns an immaculate tradesman, but here the human gem was turned at that angle to the light which revealed the flaw in it.

There are tradesmen not a few, irreproachable in regard to money, who are not so in regard to the quality of their wares in relation to the price: they take and do not give the advantage of their superior knowledge; and well can I imagine how such a one will laugh at the idea that he ought not: to him every customer is more or less of a pigeon.
"If I could but buy plenty of such sapphires," said Mr.Burns, "on a foggy afternoon like this, when the air is as yellow as a cairngorm, and sell them the first summer-like day of spring, I should make a fortune in a very few years." "But you wouldn't do it, Mr.Burns ?" Cosmo ventured to suggest, in some foreboding anxiety, caused by the tone in which the man had spoken: he would fain have an express repudiation of the advantage thus to be obtained.
"Why not ?" rejoined Mr.Burns, lifting his keen gray eyes, with some wonder in them, and looking Cosmo straight in the face.

His mind also was crossed by a painful doubt: was the young man a mere innocent?
was he "NO A' THERE ?" "Because it is not honest," replied Cosmo.
"Not honest!" exclaimed the jeweller, in a tone loud with anger, and deep with a sense of injury--whether at the idea that he should be capable of a dishonest thing, or at the possibility of having, for honesty's sake, to yield a money-making principle, I do not know; "I present the thing as it is, and leave my customer to judge according to his knowledge.