When a respectable man wishes ardently for a calamity, he arrays his face in comely melancholy, because he has too much respect for public decorum to outrage the decencies of life. Mr Samuel Ramsay Thriven accordingly _looked_ the loss he had sustained with a propriety that might have done honour to a widower between whom and a bad wife the cold grave has been shut for the space of a day, and then set about writing circulars to his creditors, stating that, owing to his having sustained a loss through the burning of a warehouse where he had deposited three thousand pounds' worth of goods, he was under the necessity of stopping payment. No attorney ever made more of letter-writing than Mr Samuel did on that day: in place of three shillings and fourpence for two pages, every word he penned was equal to a pound. CHAP. II.--THE INSCRIPTION. "Well," said Mr Samuel Thriven, after he had retired to his house, "this has been hard and hot work; but a man has a satisfaction in doing his duty, and that satisfaction may not be diminished by a bottle of port." Now the port was as good as Ofleys; and Mr Thriven's thirst was nothing the less for the fire of the previous night, which he had done his utmost not to extinguish, and as he was in good spirits, he, like those people in good health who, to make themselves better, begin to take in a load of Morrison's pills, drew another cork, with that increased sound which belongs peculiarly to second bottles, and in a short time was well through with his potation. "How much, now," said he, as he pretended, in a knowing way, to look for a dead fly in the glass, which he held up between him and the candle, shutting, in the operation, the left eye, according to the practice of connoisseurs--"how much may I make of this transanction in the way of business?--Let me see--let me see." And, as he accordingly tried to see, he took down from the mantelpiece an ink-bottle and a pen, and, having no paper within reach--he laid hold of a small book, well known to serious-minded people, and which was no other, in fact, than the "Pilgrim's Progress." But it was all one to Mr Samuel Ramsay Thriven, in the middle of his second bottle, what the book was, provided it had a blank leaf at the beginning or end thereof. It might, indeed, have been the "Louping-on-Stone for Heavy-Bottomed Believers," or the "Economy of Human Life," or the "Young Man's Best Companion," or "A New Way to Pay Old Debts;" or any other book or brochure in the wide republic of letters which the wisdom or wit of man has ever produced. It may verily be much doubted if he knew himself what book it was.