"Nevertheless I assure you Mr. Harrison exists very decidedly--a Wall-street speculator, and well known as such by business people, a capital man behind a trotter, an excellent judge of wine. Probably he will come here from the city once or twice before we leave, and I shall find an opportunity to introduce you to him, for he is really worth knowing and considerable of a man, as we say--no fool at all, except in the way he lets his wife bully him." "If he made an unsuitable match that does not show his wisdom conspicuously." "It was an unsuitable match enough, Heaven knows! But when he proposed he was in the state of mind in which sensible people do the most foolish things. He was a great man in stocks--controlled the market at one time--had been buying largely just before the election of '44, when we all expected Henry Clay would get in with plenty to spare. When Polk was elected, great was the terror of all respectable citizens. My brother caught such a fright then that I don't think he has fairly recovered from it to this day. How the stocks did tumble down! Harrison had about nine millions on his hands; he couldn't keep such a fund, and was forced to sell at any price, and lost just one third. Just as he was beginning to pick himself up after the shock and wonder, like the sailor whom the conjurer blew up, what was to come next? Mr. Whitey of the _Jacobin_, now the honorable Pompey Whitey--and one doesn't see why he shouldn't be, for after all an editor is not, generally speaking, a greater blackguard than most of our Congressmen--Whitey, I say, who for our sins is nominally attached to the Conservative party, conceived the bright idea of overbidding the enemy for popular favor, and proposed--no, he didn't actually propose in so many words, but only strongly hinted at the desirableness of the measure--that there should be no more paying rent, and a general division of property. I am not sure but there were some additional suggestions on the expediency of abolishing the Christian religion and the institution of matrimony, but that has nothing to do with politics. This last drop in the bucket quite overflowed poor Harrison; so, as if he had said to himself, "Let us eat and drink and get married, for to-morrow we shall have a proscription and _novae tabulae_," he rushed off and proposed to Miss Macintyre." "Then, if she accepted him after he lost his fortune, it shows she did not marry for money, at any rate."