grief, which collapsed with the mightiest shock.

Not only this, but the amount of money Mr. Asherill, according to his own showing, lost on each of these occasions was positively appalling. He would shake his head and beg that the subject might not be mentioned to him, it was all so terrible; and then he would contrive to drop a hint as to how far he was "in," and the majority of people believed him, and the minority who did not believe was too small to count.

After that especial Friday, in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, when, had any former citizen liked to get out of his coffin in the vaults of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, adjacent to the notorious Corner House, he might have fancied a second South Sea Bubble had just burst, after that Black Afternoon which brought ruin to thousands, Mr. Asherill quietly packed up a few clothes and left town.

Perhaps he had been waiting for some such opportunity; perhaps some stray brick of that mighty pile touched him. Be this as it may, he went quietly down to Lewes, got himself decorously arrested and lodged in gaol, and then without the slightest fuss or useless publicity passed his examination, received his certificate, joined his wife at Brighton, and spent the summer at the sea-side. It was then he became a Christian and began to wear white neckcloths.

As he said it himself, there can be no harm in my remarking that up to the period of Overend and Gurney's collapse, he had not been a Christian. He was not one when he visited Lewes—he was not one when he reached Brighton, where, after more than a quarter of a century's bad health, his wife was at length dying with a commendable if late rapidity.

Whilst engaged in this occupation, she made the acquaintance of a widow lady, who was serious and possessed of an ample competency, and who being, moreover, amiably and charitably disposed, took the invalid drives, and furnished her with many luxuries and comforts to which she had always latterly been accustomed, but which, in the then state of the Asherill finances, she might otherwise have sighed for in vain.

When Mr. Asherill once more returned to business—the City, his old haunts, and companions—he was a changed man. If he had been respectable before, he was ten times more respectable now.

He was a widower, and he mourned for his deceased wife in a hat-band a foot deep, in black clothes of the best quality and of regular City make; in jet studs, a ring containing her hair, and a white cravat which would have made the fortune of an undertaker.

Nor was this all. Short as had been his absence, it proved long enough to enable him to acquire the language and manners of the people amongst whom he meant for the future to cast his lot; and he went about the City lanes and streets, informing all with whom he stopped to speak, of the irreparable loss he had sustained, of the great change which had been wrought in himself. If he heard naughty words uttered in railway carriages, he was wont to say, "Hush," and then read his dear young friends a homily on their thoughtlessness and profanity.

He did not hesitate to tell them he had once been sinful, even as they, and he always finished by expressing a hope they might be converted earlier in life than had been the case with him.

He was always sowing good seed; and though some of it was necessarily wasted, upon the whole, I am bound to say, Mr. Asherill found the harvest pay him remarkably well.

His bankruptcy, his wife's death, the religious convictions which he was able to receive, proved the making of his fortune.

Never had Mr. Asherill done better than when other men were doing as badly as they knew how. Everything he touched turned out well for him, at least; and nothing turned out a better speculation than the widow.

Naturally, after Mrs. Asherill's death, she imparted to the widower a vast amount of religious consolation, and likewise naturally Mr. Asherill found her conversation comfort and uphold him exceedingly.

Indeed, he found it so comforting that at the expiration of two years from the period of his failure, that is, in the summer of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight, he ventured to offer himself and his prospects to the widow.

He was a man and a convert, what could a lone woman desire or ask more? Nothing perhaps, and yet the widow had her doubts.

She had been so often angled for, that she looked rather closely at the bait before she rose to it, and hinted that whilst friendship urged her to say "Yes," prudence advised her to say "No."

She knew so little of Mr. Asherill's antecedents, she was so ignorant even of the names of any of his friends, that—

"The name of Samuel Witney is familiar to you, doubtless," interrupted Mr. Asherill.

Yes, the widow knew it well. He was a shining light in his own particular denomination, and she had read his speeches, and listened to his lectures with delight and instruction.

"I suppose then," suggested Mr. Asherill, "that if he writes to you saying he has known me for twenty years, believes me incapable of a mean action, and can vouch for my perfect respectability, I may hope—"

What he hoped was not exactly conveyed in words, but it resulted in the widow saying,

"Oh! Mr. Asherill," and setting her cap, which had suddenly become disarranged, straight.

I do not wish to enlarge upon this theme, however; the loves of elderly couples cannot be made attractive by any sort of writing yet discovered, and the billing and cooing of a pair of old doves is music which no art can render sweet in the ear of the listener.

Immediately on Mr. Asherill's return to town, he informed Mr. Witney of his wishes, as well as of the great change he had experienced, thus killing, as was his wont, two birds with one stone.

He secured a second wife with a handsome income, every penny of which he insisted should be settled on herself; and he cemented the friendship, so called, which had after City fashion subsisted between himself and Mr. Witney.

"It is so pleasant to think you are at last one of us," said that gentleman, and undoubtedly Mr. Asherill thought so too.

CHAPTER II.

A VERY WET SATURDAY.

To this man, prosperous in spite of the reverses he had experienced—contented notwithstanding the recollections his memory must have held—hypocritical to Heaven and his fellows as he had once been to his fellows alone—to this man who, having turned over a new leaf on which nothing was traced save piety and respectability, found money, and, as a natural consequence, a certain amount of consideration also, there came on an especially wet Saturday, in a very recent year of grace, one of his clerks, who handed to him a slip of paper on which two names were written, and waited to hear his pleasure as to admitting the owners of them to a private audience.

"Ask them to walk in," said Mr. Asherill; and accordingly two men did walk in, with foreigner stamped upon them from head to foot.

"Pray be seated," suggested Mr. Asherill, acknowledging, from his side of the table, their greetings, but either not seeing or not wishing to see that one at least of the two was prepared to shake hands.

There had been a time—but that was in his unregenerate and impecunious state—when friends were as scarce as florins, so it seems almost ungenerous to state the fact of Mr. Asherill having once been glad to hear himself familiarly accosted by the shorter, fairer, and apparently franker