How he employed the thirty-five years preceding the above-mentioned twenty-five of his sojourn in this wicked world, it would be tedious to specify.
His enemies--for even such is the depravity of human nature, Mr. Asherill had enemies--said a considerable portion of the period must have been spent in obtaining a practical knowledge of the roguery, vice, falsehood, and trickery, which he denounced so unctuously; and it is quite certain that in whatever school he may have graduated, his information on the subject of all the sins to which flesh is prone, his thorough acquaintance with all the forms of lying and cheating, to which what he habitually styled "poor human nature" is addicted, were as complete as marvellous.
There must have been a black night at some period or other in his life; but no man in the City, at all events, could fix a date and locality when and where that event happened which caused Mr. Asherill to conceive a dread of, and dislike for, gentlemen and ladies, which was the one weak spot in an otherwise almost perfect Christian character.
Mr. Asherill's account of his own early life was that he worked in a cotton mill at Manchester; that through the kindness of a poor scholar who lodged in the house of his, Asherill's, sole surviving relative, his grandmother, he learned to read, write and cipher; that, being steady and hardworking, he attracted the attention and secured the interest of a Christian blessed with worldly means and influence, who took him first into his own warehouse, and subsequently procured for him an appointment in India, where he remained for a long time, and might have remained till the end of his life, had not the delicate health of his wife compelled him, ten years after his marriage, to choose the alternative of parting from her or leaving India.
"Guided by Providence," said Mr. Asherill, "I decided on returning to England."
Which was all likely enough and plausible enough, only it happened to be untrue in one particular at least.
An unregenerate wag who met Mr. Asherill at the Crystal Palace in the days when the mysteries of cotton spinning were expounded in the machinery department for the benefit of the masses, who were then supposed to be hungering and thirsting after solid information, persuaded that gentleman to inspect the process, and under pretence of ignorance beguiled the former factory lad into making various statements which proved conclusively he never could have been in a mill, save as a mere visitor, in his life.