disasters; and sees the various ways how men go down in the world, as
well as the arts and management, by which others from nothing arise to
wealth and estates.

Here he sees the Scripture itself thwarted, and his neighbour tradesman,
a wholesale haberdasher, in spite of a good understanding, in spite of a
good beginning, and in spite of the most indefatigable industry, sink in
his circumstances, lose his credit, then his stock, and then break and
become bankrupt, while the man takes more pains to be poor than others
do to grow rich.

There, on the other hand, he sees G.D., a plodding, weak-headed, but
laborious wretch, of a confined genius, and that cannot look a quarter
of a mile from his shop-door into the world, and beginning with little
or nothing, yet rises apace in the mere road of business, in which he
goes on like the miller's horse, who, being tied to the post, is turned
round by the very wheel which he turns round himself; and this fellow
shall get money insensibly, and grow rich even he knows not how, and no
body else knows why.

Here he sees F.M. ruined by too much trade, and there he sees M.F.
starved for want of trade; and from all these observations he may learn
something useful to himself, and fit to guide his own measures, that he
may not fall into the same mischiefs which he sees others sink under,
and that he may take the advantage of that prudence which others rise
by.

All these things will naturally occur to him, in his conversing among
his fellow-tradesmen. A settled little society of trading people, who
understand business, and are carrying on trade in the same manner with