Five-and-twenty years before the date of this story, the firm of Derinzy and Sons was well known and highly esteemed in the City of London. They were supposed to have been originally of Polish extraction, and their name to have been Derinski; but it had been painted up as Derinzy for years on the door-posts of their warehouse in Gough Square, Fleet Street, and it was so spelt on all the invoices, bill-heads, and other commercial literature of the firm. Warehouses, invoices, and bill-heads? Yes, despite their Polish extraction and distinguished name, the Derinzys were neither more nor less than furriers--wholesale, and on a large scale, it was true, but still furriers. Their business was enormous, and their profits immense. The old father, Peter Derinzy, who had founded the firm, and whose business talent and industry were the main causes of its success, had given up active attendance, and was beginning to take life leisurely. He came down twice a week, perhaps, in a handsome carriage-and-pair, to Gough Square, just glanced over the books, and occasionally looked at some samples of skins, on which his opinion--still the most reliable in the whole trade--was requested by his son, and then went back to his mansion at Muswell Hill, where his connection with business was unknown or ignored, and where he was Squire Derinzy, dwelling in luxury, and passing his time in the superintendence of his graperies and pineries, his forcing-houses and his farm. The affairs of the house did not suffer by the old gentleman's absence. In his eldest son Paul, on whom the command devolved in his father's absence, the senior partner had a representative possessing all the experience and tact which he had gained, combined with the youth and energy which he had lost. Men of high standing in the City of London, many years his seniors, were glad to know Paul Derinzy, eager to ask his advice, and, what is quite a different matter, frequently not unwilling to take it in regard to the great speculations of the day. The merchants from the North of Europe with whom he transacted business--and to all of whom he spoke in their own language, without the slightest betrayal of foreign accent or lack of idiom--looked upon him as an absolute wonder, more especially when contrasted with his own countrymen, who for the most part spoke nothing but English, and little of that beyond oaths, and spread his renown far and wide. He was a tall, high-shouldered, big-boned man, prematurely bald, and, being very short-sighted, wore a large pair of spectacles, which impelled his younger brother Alexis, then fresh from school, and just received into the counting-house, to be initiated into the mysteries of trade preparatory to being made a partner, to call him "Gig-lamps." Paul Derinzy was not a good-tempered man, and at any time would have disliked this impertinence; but addressed to him as it was, before the clerks, it nettled him exceedingly. He forbade its repetition under