Dr. Heidegger, once invitedfour venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen,Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman, whose namewas the Widow Wycherly.
Mr. Medbourne,in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation,and was now little better than a mendicant.
Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and hishealth and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of pains,such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body.
Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician,a man of evil fame, or at least had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the presentgeneration, and made him obscure instead of infamous.
As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tellsus that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion,on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her.
Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew,and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow Wycherly, and had once been on the point ofcutting each other’s throats for her sake.