merchant, nor indeed any profession, not even a professional dandy."

"Oh! love in a cottage, I suppose," interrupted Mrs. Million.

"Neither love in a cottage, nor science in a cell."

"Oh! pray tell me what it is."

"What if is? Oh! Lord Mayor of London, I suppose; that is the only
situation which answers to my oracular description."

"Then you have been joking all this time!"

"Not at all. Come then, let us imagine this perfect lot. In the first
place, I would be born in the middle classes of society, or even lower,
because I would wish my character to be impartially developed. I would
be born to no hereditary prejudices, no hereditary passions. My course
in life should not be carved out by the example of a grandfather, nor my
ideas modelled to a preconceived system of family perfection. Do you
like my first principle, Mrs. Million?"

"I must hear everything before I give an opinion."

"When, therefore, my mind was formed, I would wish to become the
proprietor of a princely fortune."

"Yes!" eagerly exclaimed Mrs. Million.

"And now would come the moral singularity of my fate. If I had gained
this fortune by commerce, or in any other similar mode, my disposition,