I do not wish to enlarge upon this theme, however; the loves of elderly couples cannot be made attractive by any sort of writing yet discovered, and the billing and cooing of a pair of old doves is music which no art can render sweet in the ear of the listener. Immediately on Mr. Asherill's return to town, he informed Mr. Witney of his wishes, as well as of the great change he had experienced, thus killing, as was his wont, two birds with one stone. He secured a second wife with a handsome income, every penny of which he insisted should be settled on herself; and he cemented the friendship, so called, which had after City fashion subsisted between himself and Mr. Witney. "It is so pleasant to think you are at last one of _us_," said that gentleman, and undoubtedly Mr. Asherill thought so too. CHAPTER II. A VERY WET SATURDAY. To this man, prosperous in spite of the reverses he had experienced--contented notwithstanding the recollections his memory must have held--hypocritical to Heaven and his fellows as he had once been to his fellows alone--to this man who, having turned over a new leaf on which nothing was traced save piety and respectability, found money, and, as a natural consequence, a certain amount of consideration also, there came on an especially wet Saturday, in a very recent year of grace, one of his clerks, who handed to him a slip of paper on which two names were written, and waited to hear his pleasure as to admitting the owners of them to a private audience. "Ask them to walk in," said Mr. Asherill; and accordingly two men did walk in, with foreigner stamped upon them from head to foot. "Pray be seated," suggested Mr. Asherill, acknowledging, from his side of the table, their greetings, but either not seeing or not wishing to see that one at least of the two was prepared to shake hands. There had been a time--but that was in his unregenerate and impecunious state--when friends were as scarce as florins, so it seems almost ungenerous to state the fact of Mr. Asherill having once been glad to hear himself familiarly accosted by the shorter, fairer, and apparently franker of his visitors. For many reasons Mr. Asherill disliked gentlemen who had not been privileged to be born Britons. In his capacity as a Christian and a Dissenter he disapproved of people whom he classed roughly all round as "Papists," "Jesuits," and "Infidels." In his capacity as a citizen of the City of London, he regarded foreigners as interlopers, and had once actually written a letter to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer suggesting a tax upon Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, and others, as a means at once of raising the revenue and of relieving Englishmen from an irritating and disastrous competition.