zo, the solid commercial assurance of Smith.
Together the three proved irresistible. He prospered. He died worth
twenty-five thousand pounds, which had indeed been fifty thousand but
for an unlucky error.

"Like many another discoverer, he pushed his discovery too far.
He reasoned--but the reasoning was not _in pari materia_--that what
he had applied to Art he could apply to Religion. In compliment to
what he understood to be the ancient faith of the Desboroughs he had
embraced the principles of Roman Catholicism--his motto, by the way,
was _Thorough_--and this landed him, shortly after middle age, in an
awkward predicament. He had, in an access of spleen, set fire to the
house of a client whose payments were in arrear. The good priest who
confessed him recommended, nay enjoined, an expiatory pilgrimage to
Rome; and my uncle, on the excuse of a rush of orders, despatched a
junior clerk to perform the pilgrimage for him.

"For a time all went well. The young man (whom my uncle had promoted
from the painting of public-house sign-boards) made his way to Rome,
saluted the statue of the Fisherman, climbed on his knees up the
Scala Sancta, laid out the prescribed sum on relics, beads,
scapulars, medals, and what-not, and, in short, fulfilled all the
articles of my uncle's vow. On the second evening, after an
exhausting tour of the churches, he sat down in a tavern, and
incautiously, upon an empty stomach, treated himself to a whole flask
of the white wine of Sicily. It produced a revulsion, in which he
remembered his Protestant upbringing; and the upshot was, a Switzer
found him, late that night, supine in the roadway beneath the Vatican
gardens, gazing up at the moon and damning the Pope. Behaviour so
little consonant with his letters of introduction naturally awoke
misgivings. He was taken to the cells, where he broke down, and with
crapulous tears confessed the imposture; which so incensed His
Holiness that my uncle only bought himself off excommunication by
payment of a crippling sum down, and an annual tribute of his own
weight (sixteen stone twelve) in candles of pure spermaceti.
O Badcock, fill Donna Julia's glass, and pass the bottle!"

We spent the next five days in company with these strange
fellow-lodgers, and more than once it gave me an uncanny feeling to
turn in the midst of Mr. Fett's prattle and, catching the eye of
Marc'antonio or Stephanu as they sat and listened with absolute
gravity, to ref