n
for diligence and fidelity; and at the age of three-and-twenty opened a
shop for myself with a large stock, and such credit among all the
merchants, who were acquainted with my master, that I could command
whatever was imported curious or valuable. For five years I proceeded
with success proportionate to close application and untainted integrity;
was a daring bidder at every sale; always paid my notes before they were
due; and advanced so fast in commercial reputation, that I was
proverbially marked out as the model of young traders, and every one
expected that a few years would make me an alderman.

In this course of even prosperity, I was one day persuaded to buy a
ticket in the lottery. The sum was inconsiderable, part was to be repaid
though fortune might fail to favour me, and therefore my established
maxims of frugality did not restrain me from so trifling an experiment.
The ticket lay almost forgotten till the time at which every man's fate
was to be determined; nor did the affair even then seem of any
importance, till I discovered by the publick papers that the number next
to mine had conferred the great prize.

My heart leaped at the thought of such an approach to sudden riches,
which I considered myself, however contrarily to the laws of
computation, as having missed by a single chance; and I could not
forbear to revolve the consequences which such a bounteous allotment
would have produced, if it had happened to me. This dream of felicity,
by degrees, took possession of my imagination. The great delight of my
solitary hours was to purchase an estate, and form plantations with
money which once might have been mine, and I never met my friends but I
spoiled all their merriment by perpetual complaints of my ill luck.

At length another lottery was opened, and I had now so heated my
imagination with the prospect of a prize, that I should have pressed
among the first purchasers, had not my ardour been withheld by
deliberation upon the probability of success from one ticket rather than
another. I hesitated long between even and odd; considered the square
and cubick numbers through the lottery; examined all those to which good
luck had been hitherto annexed; and at last fixed upon one, which, by
some secret relation to the events of my life, I thought predestined to
make me happy. Delay in great affairs is often mischievous; the ticket
was sold, and its possessor could not be found.

I returned to my conjectures