ad not his personal expenses
and extravagances pulled him down. He had gallantly availed himself of
his wife's fortune; nor could any man in London, as he proudly said,
have made five hundred pounds go so far. He had, as we have seen,
furnished a house, sideboard, and cellar with it: he had a carriage, and
horses in his stable, and with the remainder he had purchased shares
in four companies--of three of which he was founder and director, had
conducted innumerable bargains in the foreign stocks, had lived and
entertained sumptuously, and made himself a very considerable income. He
had set up THE CAPITOL Loan and Life Assurance Company, had discovered
the Chimborazo gold mines, and the Society for Recovering and Draining
the Pontine Marshes; capital ten millions; patron HIS HOLINESS THE POPE.
It certainly was stated in an evening paper that His Holiness had made
him a Knight of the Spur, and had offered to him the rank of Count; and
he was raising a loan for His Highness, the Cacique of Panama, who had
sent him (by way of dividend) the grand cordon of His Highness's order
of the Castle and Falcon, which might be seen any day at his office in
Bond Street, with the parchments signed and sealed by the Grand Master
and Falcon King-at-arms of His Highness. In a week more Walker would
have raised a hundred thousand pounds on His Highness's twenty per cent.
loan; he would have had fifteen thousand pounds commission for himself;
his companies would have risen to par, he would have realised his
shares; he would have gone into Parliament; he would have been made a
baronet, who knows? a peer, probably! "And I appeal to you, sir," Walker
would say to his friends, "could any man have shown better proof of his
affection for his wife than by laying out her little miserable money as
I did? They call me heartless, sir, because I didn't succeed; sir, my
life has been a series of sacrifices for that woman, such as no man ever
performed before."

A proof of Walker's dexterity and capability for business may be seen
in the fact that he had actually appeased and reconciled one of his
bitterest enemies--our honest friend Eglantine. After Walker's marriage
Eglantine, who had now no mercantile dealings with his former agent,
became so enraged with him, that, as the only means of revenge in his
power, he sent him in his bill for goods supplied to the amount of
one hundred and fifty guineas, and sued him for the amount. But Walker
stepped boldly o