"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.
Further, Mr. Asherill not merely believed that foreign men and women were unbelievers, and that they crossed the Channel for no other object except to pick the pocket of John Bull, but he also fancied—not entirely without reason perhaps—that, polite manners and politer words nevertheless, all foreigners with whom he came in contact had taken his measure pretty accurately, and were laughing at him in their sleeve.
In a word, the very idea of such falseness and frivolity, when conjoined with the art of making money, was odious to Mr. Asherill; and he had made much good play amongst staid heads of families, and in the company of elders of churches, by giving utterance to opinions that had at least the merit of sincerity, on the subject of peaceful foreign invasion.