ll put in just as much as I do. You will put in rather more; for
you once put in L500, which has been spent long ago. I don't put in a
shilling of my own. I live on my clients, and I very willingly offer you
half of them!'

"Imagine, dear Paul, my astonishment, my dismay! I saw myself married to
a hideous shrew,--son-in-law to a penniless scoundrel, and cheated out
of my whole fortune! Compare this view of the question with that which
had blazed on me when I contemplated being son-in-law to the rich
Mr. Asgrave. I stormed at first. Mr. Asgrave took up Bacon 'On the
Advancement of Learning,' and made no reply till I was cooled by
explosion. You will perceive that when passion subsided, I necessarily
saw that nothing was left for me but adopting my father-in-law's
proposal. Thus, by the fatality which attended me at the very time I
meant to reform, I was forced into scoundrelism, and I was driven into
defrauding a vast number of persons by the accident of being son-in-law
to a great moralist. As Mr. Asgrave was an indolent man, who passed his
mornings in speculations on virtue, I was made the active partner.
I spent the day at the counting-house; and when I came home for
recreation, my wife scratched my eyes out."

"But were you never recognized as 'the stranger' or 'the adventurer' in
your new capacity?"

"No; for of course I assumed, in all my changes, both aliases and
disguises. And, to tell you the truth, my marriage so altered me that,
what with a snuff-coloured coat and a brown scratch wig, with a pen in
my right ear, I looked the very picture of staid respectability. My face
grew an inch longer every day. Nothing is so respectable as a long face;
and a subdued expression of countenance is the surest sign of commercial
prosperity. Well, we went on splendidly enough for about a year.
Meanwhile I was wonderfully improved in philosophy. You have no idea how
a scolding wife sublimes and rarefies one's intellect. Thunder clears
the air, you know! At length, unhappily for my fame (for I contemplated
a magnificent moral history of man, which, had she lived a year longer,
I should have completed), my wife died in child-bed. My father-in-law
and I were talking over the event, and finding fault with civilization
for the enervating habits by which women die of their children instead
of bringing them forth without being even conscious of the circumstance,
when a bit of paper, sealed awry, was given to my partner. He looked
o