t of architecture, but perhaps as substantial, Mr. Brown, as
the very respectable brick block with dry-goods stores, tailors' shops
and banking-rooms on the lower floor, and lawyers' offices in the
second story, which you are so anxious to substitute."

"And the cost, Peter? Eh?" said Mr. Brown as he withdrew in something
of a pet. "That, I suppose, will be provided for off-hand by drawing a
check on Bubble Bank?"

John Brown and Peter Goldthwaite had been jointly known to the
commercial world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm
of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily
dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since
that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other
John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had
prospered wonderfully and become one of the wealthiest John Browns on
earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after innumerable schemes
which ought to have collected all the coin and paper currency of the
country into his coffers, was as needy a gentleman as ever wore a
patch upon his elbow. The contrast between him and his former partner
may be briefly marked, for Brown never reckoned upon luck, yet always
had it, while Peter made luck the main condition of his projects, and
always missed it. While the means held out his speculations had been
magnificent, but were chiefly confined of late years to such small
business as adventures in the lottery. Once he had gone on a
gold-gathering expedition somewhere to the South, and ingeniously
contrived to empty his pockets more thoroughly than ever, while
others, doubtless, were filling theirs with native bullion by the
handful. More recently he had expended a legacy of a thousand or two
of dollars in purchasing Mexican scrip, and thereby became the
proprietor of a province; which, however, so far as Peter could find
out, was situated where he might have had an empire for the same
money--in the clouds. From a search after this valuable real estate
Peter returned so gaunt and threadbare that on reaching New England
the scarecrows in the corn-fields beckoned to him as he passed by.
"They did but flutter in the wind," quoth Peter Goldthwaite. No,
Peter, they beckoned, for the scarecrows knew their brother.

At the period of our story his whole visible income would not have
paid the tax of the old mansion in which we find him. It was one of
those rusty, moss-grown, ma