the manufacture, and became a merchant, thinking that this occupation would afford better opportunities for the gratification of his ambition than the straightforward old manufacture. No wonder he was tempted by schemes which promised a higher than extraordinary rate of profits! No wonder he dealt in articles whose extremely varying prices were determined by other than the usual circumstances,—which prices he hoped to catch at the highest, and then to have done with the article! No wonder that he guessed respecting such uncertain circumstances as the changes of fashion, wet and dry seasons, the extent of particular crops on the other side the globe; and then proceeded to act upon these guesses! Sometimes he was right, sometimes wrong. Sometimes he made five thousand pounds at a stroke, sometimes lost ten in a season. Much as his capital was lessened on the whole by his speculations, this was by no means the worst result of his proceedings. Like all other gamesters, he became so fond of the excitement, that, much as he often suffered from it, he could no longer live without it; and the domestic influence which is the most powerful means of winning a man from bad habits of any kind, was not so powerful in Waldie’s case as if his first affections had not been disappointed. Attentive as he always was to his wife when with her, kind as he had till lately been to his children, vehement as were the fancies he took, now to Portugal laurels, now to tall trees, now to bay-windows or new drawing-room furniture, his happiness was not in his home, but in the heats and chills of his hopes, in city news of disasters at sea, of changeable weather, of new inventions or improvements of manufactured articles, and of political changes,—of anything that might affect his speculations. His poor wife knew nothing for a long while of his unfortunate ventures, though she heard enough of exultation over his good ones. She believed that he must be growing enormously rich, and sighed over the idea, since it seemed that the richer he became, the less pleasure he took in his home. When he first began to alter his tone, (which he did very suddenly,) when he talked one day of bringing up their children to provide for themselves, and moving into a small house in the city, and the next of purchasing some splendid estate, and again of giving up his carriages and sending away half his servants, she was confounded; not knowing how much to believe, or to wish to believe; whether to suppose poverty to be in prospect, or her husband to have lost the soundness of his judgment. It was now some comfort to know how their affairs stood, though she would rather have heard it from her husband than from Letitia. She had long seen that Waldie’s family ambition could not be gratified. Whichever way the scale might turn at last, whether he left his family in poverty or magnificence, it was impossible that his memory should be honoured like