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184 truth, my marriage so altered me, that what with a snuff-coloured coat, and a brown scratch wig, with a pen in my right ear, I looked the very picture of staid respectability. My face grew an inch longer every day. Nothing is so respectable as a long face! and a subdued expression of countenance is the surest sign of commercial prosperity. Well, we went on splendidly enough for about a year. Meanwhile I was wonderfully improved in philosophy. You have no idea how a scolding wife sublimes and rarifies one's intellect. Thunder clears the air, you know! At length, unhappily for my fame, (for I contemplated a magnificent moral history of man, which, had she lived a year longer, I should have completed) my wife died in child-bed. My father-in-law and I were talking over the event, and finding fault with civilization, by the enervating habits of which, women die of their children, instead of bringing them forth without being even conscious of the circumstance;—when a bit of paper, sealed awry, was given to my partner: he looked over it—finished the discussion, and then told me our Bank had stopped payment. 'Now, Augustus,' said he,