Men who have been the "architects of their own fortunes," never admit that good luck has had any thing to do with their prosperity. Their pardonable vanity at their own success makes them guilty of a species of ingratitude to Providence. Listen to one of these old gentlemen holding forth to his hopeful son or nephew on his, the said old gentleman's, past life; on his early poverty, his self-denial, his hard work, and his subsequent reward; and the burden of his discourse is ever the same, "_Alone_ I did it, boy!" Should the listener at any point be tempted rashly to exclaim "how lucky!" the old gentleman will turn on him with a severe frown and say, "luck, sir; nonsense. There's no such thing as luck. Live on a crust, sir; that's the only way for a man to get on in the world." The old gentleman quite forgets that if his first venture in the _Chutnee_ East Indiaman had been a failure; or his first dabble in the stocks had not been followed by the battle of Leipsic; or his senior partner, who had nine-tenths of the profits of the business, had not departed this life suddenly in an apoplectic fit, he would have held a very different position in the world, and probably have been now a denizen of the second floor over his counting-house in the city, instead of a resident in Hyde Park Gardens. An excellent specimen of this class of old gentlemen is "Uncle John." The obscurity of his early days is so great that even he himself finds it difficult to penetrate it. That he had a father and a mother is incontestable; but these worthy people seem to have left this world of sin at so early a period of "Uncle John's" existence, that, for all practical purposes, he might as well have been without them. His first juvenile recollections are connected with yellow stockings, leather shorts, a cutaway coatee with a tin badge on it, and a little round woolen cap with a tuft in the middle of it, resting on a head formed by nature to accommodate a cap of double its dimensions. In a word, "Uncle John" was a charity-boy. It must not be imagined that the above fact has ever been communicated by Uncle John himself; for the worthy man is weak enough to be ashamed of it, though he will discourse of his early privations in a mystical manner, with the design apparently of inducing you to regard him rather as a counterpart of Louis Philippe in his days of early exile, than as a commonplace, though equally interesting (to a right-thinking mind) young gentleman in yellow stockings. It _is_ a fact, however, as indisputable as that Uncle John is now worth thirty or forty thousand pounds.