constantly he talked of getting on, of enterprises,
of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings,
Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations, realisations and the marvelous ways
of Chance with men--in all localities, that is to say, that are not
absolutely sunken to the level of Cold Mutton Fat.

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of three
positions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a high barrier,
he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pill-stuff into
long rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife, or
he stood looking out of the shop door against the case of sponges and
spray-diffusers, while I surveyed him from behind the counter, or he
leant against the little drawers behind the counter, and I hovered
dusting in front. The thought of those early days brings back to my
nostrils the faint smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled
now with streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rows
of jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that stood
behind him. My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come into the shop
in a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of connubial ragging
expedition, and get much fun over the abbreviated Latinity of those gilt
inscriptions. "Ol Amjig, George," she would read derisively, "and he
pretends it's almond oil! Snap!--and that's mustard. Did you ever,
George?

"Look at him, George, looking dignified. I'd like to put an old label
on to him round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol Pondo on it.
That's Latin for Impostor, George MUST be. He'd look lovely with a
stopper."

"YOU want a stopper," said my uncle, projecting his face....

My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender, with a
delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial badinage, to
a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery ghost of lisping in her
speech. She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my presence
at meals wore off, I became more and more aware of a filmy but extensive
net of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations until it had
become the reality of her life. She affected a derisive attitude to the
world at large and applied the epithet "old" to more things than I have
ever heard linked to it before or since. "Here's the old news-paper,"
she used to say--to my uncle. "Now don't go and get it in the butter,
you silly old Sardine!"

"What