If in their blindness they ignore the probability of money making unto itself wings--even money coined as theirs has been out of the blood drawn from men's hearts, the anguished tears of women, the broken hopes of youth, and the disgrace heaped upon old age--it is not in the slightest degree likely they trouble themselves concerning the possible vagaries of their spirits. Death, if the idea of dying present itself, is looked at either as an end of happiness or a cessation from anxiety. It is bankruptcy in both cases. It ends a successful career; it smooths all difficulties in the path of those whose experiments have proved abortive, whose attempts have resulted in failure; and, as the earth-worm is no respecter of persons, it cuts short the career of worldly consideration, it renders men's good opinion valueless, it places the best-esteemed City magnate in a position where even a plum of money will not enable him to pass muster in a more creditable manner than the Bethnal Green pauper who has nothing to leave his family except his bones. Death is bankruptcy. Can I say more in its disfavour when writing of a class who hold personal bankruptcy--their own, I mean--a calamity too great to contemplate; who estimate a man's standing, for here and hereafter, by the amount he has managed to rake and scrape together; and who live by swooping down upon his possessions, and selling the house which shelters him, the bed he lies on, the toys his children have played with, the dog he has fondled, the horses he has ridden, the harp his dead mother's fingers have touched? Much more might be said of the race, but as one man of the genus waits, claiming particular attention, you and I reader will, leaving generalities, walk up to the first floor of Salisbury Buildings, Leadenhall Street, City, and enter the private office of Mr. Asherill, senior partner in the firm of Asherill and Swanland, Public Accountants. Well known was Mr. Asherill in the City; his large frame, his high well-developed forehead, his massive head, his broad shoulders, his perfectly white hair, were as familiar to the _habitués_ of Basinghall Street, and the thorough-fares conducting to that heaven for rogues and hell for honest people, as the faces of the ticket-porters in Lombard Street, or the livery of those stately gentlemen who lounge about the entrance to the Bank of England. And indeed it must have been accounted a shame had it proved otherwise, for Mr. Asherill was living, moving, and having his being in the City for five-and-twenty years at all events, before the new Bankruptcy Act developed that particular class of industry in which Mr. Asherill is at this present moment employing the great and varied talents with which, to quote his own modest phrase,--"The Lord has seen fit to bless him." How he employed the thirty-five years preceding the above-mentioned twenty-five of his sojourn in this wicked world, it would be tedious to specify.