This naturally engaging a conversation, he
acquainted me where he lived, which was at a considerable
distance from where I met with him, and where he had stray'd
insensibly on the same intention of a morning walk.
He was, as I afterwards learn'd in the course of the
intimacy which this little accident gave birth to, an old
bachelor, turn'd of sixty, but of a fresh vigorous complexion,
insomuch that he scarce marked five and forty, having never
rack'd his constitution by permitting his desires to overtax
his ability.
As to his birth and condition, his parents, honest and
fail'd mechanicks, had, by the best traces he could get of
them, left him an infant orphan on the parish; so that it was
from a charity-school, that, by honesty and industry, he made
his way into a merchant's counting-house; from whence, being
sent to a house in CADIZ, he there, by his talents and acti-
vity, acquired a fortune, but an immense one, with which he
returned to his native country; where he could not, however,
so much as fish out one single relation out of the obscurity
he was born in. Taking then a taste for retirement, and
pleas'd to enjoy life, like a mistress in the dark, he flowed
his days in all the ease of opulence, without the least parade
of it; and, rather studying the concealment than the shew of a
fortune, looked down on a world he perfectly knew; himself, to
his wish, unknown and unmarked by.
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