the regulation of his future conduct, and forbidding him to draw for any thing but advice.
The young gentleman's temper happened luckily to fall in with his father's. He undertook, if he were eligibly set out, to make his fortune. His maxims were, from early youth, that if a man chose to fix his eye upon a spot, let it be ever so out of his present reach, or surrounded by ever such difficulties, through perseverance it might be come at. In little, he had proved this doctrine to be founded; for he never in his life possessed, in his own right, a single sixpence, and yet he had cut a figure with the best.
It is curious to remark, that though no man upon earth knew better the value of substance than Mr. Gloss, yet he seem constantly to live upon

shadow. The appearance, and not the thing itself, seemed to be what he most delighted in. He so completely turned round all his employers in their own business, that the tide of their fortune soon ran in a larger channel, and they were astonished at the riches which originated from plans of his advising. They however little considered what a yoke they were forming for themselves; for it was not long before the young gentleman stipulated for a participation of their profits, in consequence of which he took the earliest opportunity to involve the affairs of the partnership, and was the only one able to save any thing from the wreck of a bankruptcy, in which the whole concern was soon involved.
After this stroke he went to Madeira, where he drew a picture of the folly of his partners, and shewed very clearly—for it is certainly true that people are to be reasoned into, as well as out of, any thing—how unwisely they had acted, and how foolishly he had thrown away his time.
Being, through a house with which he had been connected, very soon taken in an active partner, for a slight share of the profits, and with liberty to trade privately on his own account, he entered into the spirit of the Madeira trade in such a style as astonished every merchant on the island. He had the address

to tie the Dunkirk dealers down to give him and his connections a preference in brandies, provided they dealt to such an amount; in consequence of which he soon had it in his power to stagnate the Dunkirk trade in Madeira, by being able to undersell the brandy merchants themselves, who, eager to catch at the bait he held out for them, had supplied him largely, little suspecting he