created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for
him, which I, for one, would most heartily endorse. The poor fellow
was very much the creature of his circumstances. But this was scarcely
the case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known how
to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many cultivated
tastes. He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same village as
myself. By some curious accident he was flung into the vortex of
London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in a reputable firm of
stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street. He rose rapidly, speculated
largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at
thirty. I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we
had sat upon the same bench at school. I can see him still;
well-fleshed and immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of
gold; a prop of music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants;
flashing from one to the other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a
man envied and admired by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to
whom he appeared a kind of Napoleon of finance. I will confess that I
myself was a little dazzled by his careless opulence. When he took me
to dine with him he thought nothing of giving the head waiter a
sovereign as a guarantee of careful service, or of sending another
sovereign to the master of the orchestra with a request for some
particular piece of music which he fancied. He once confided to me
that he had brought off certain operations which had made him the
possessor of eighty thousand pounds. To me the sum seemed immense, but
he regarded it as a bagatelle. When I suggested certain uses for it,
such as retirement to the country, the building of a country house, the
collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at me. He informed
me that he never spent more than a single day in the country every
year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm. He loathed
the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year an
infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once,
but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his
eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette
table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was
avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not
live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer t