nd the gents
who met in the private parlour of the convivial Wheeler, my host of
the Harlequin's Head, came to witness their comrade's good fortune, and
would have liked, with a generous sympathy for success, to share in it.
"Now was the time," Tom Driver had suggested to the Colonel, "to have
up the specie ship that was sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, with the
three hundred and eighty thousand dollars on board, besides bars and
doubloons." "The Tredyddlums were very low--to be bought for an old
song--never was such an opportunity for buying shares," Mr. Keightley
insinuated; and Jack Holt pressed forward his tobacco-smuggling scheme,
the audacity of which pleased the Colonel more than any other of the
speculations proposed to him. Then of the Harlequin's Head boys: there
was Jack Rackstraw, who knew of a pair of horses which the Colonel must
buy; Tom Fleet, whose satirical paper, The Swell, wanted but two hundred
pounds of capital to be worth a thousand a year to any man--"with such
a power and influence, Colonel, you rogue, and the entree of the
green-rooms in London," Tom urged; whilst little Moss Abiams entreated
the Colonel not to listen to these absurd fellows with their humbugging
speculations, but to invest his money in some good bills which Moss
could get for him, and which would return him fifty per cent as safe as
the Bank of England.

Each and all of these worthies came round the Colonel with their various
blandishments; but he had courage enough to resist them, and to button
up his notes in the pocket of his coat, and go home to Strong, and
"sport" the outer door of the chambers. Honest Strong had given his
fellow-lodger good advice about all his acquaintances; and though, when
pressed, he did not mind frankly taking twenty pounds himself out of the
Colonel's winnings, Strong was a great deal too upright to let others
cheat him.

He was not a bad fellow when in good fortune, this Altamont. He ordered
a smart livery for Grady, and made poor old Costigan shed tears of
quickly dried gratitude by giving him a five-pound note after a snug
dinner at the Back Kitchen, and he bought a green shawl for Mrs. Bolton,
and a yellow one for Fanny: the most brilliant "sacrifices" of a Regent
Street haberdasher's window. And a short time after this, upon her
birthday, which happened in the month of June, Miss Amory received from
"a friend" a parcel containing an enormous brass inlaid writing-desk,
in which there was a set of