n, as large as life.

The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll guess that my father was a
Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty tray. It
represented a large lady going along a serpentining up-hill gravel-walk,
to attend a little church. Two swans had likewise come astray with the
same intentions. When I call her a large lady, I don't mean in point of
breadth, for there she fell below my views, but she more than made it up
in heighth; her heighth and slimness was--in short THE heighth of both.

I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or more
likely screeching one) of the doctor's standing it up on a table against
the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever my own father and mother were
in that part of the country, I used to put my head (I have heard my own
mother say it was flaxen curls at that time, though you wouldn't know an
old hearth-broom from it now till you come to the handle, and found it
wasn't me) in at the doctor's door, and the doctor was always glad to see
me, and said, "Aha, my brother practitioner! Come in, little M.D. How
are your inclinations as to sixpence?"

You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet could my father nor yet my
mother. If you don't go off as a whole when you are about due, you're
liable to go off in part, and two to one your head's the part. Gradually
my father went off his, and my mother went off hers. It was in a
harmless way, but it put out the family where I boarded them. The old
couple, though retired, got to be wholly and solely devoted to the Cheap
Jack business, and were always selling the family off. Whenever the
cloth was laid for dinner, my father began rattling the plates and
dishes, as we do in our line when we put up crockery for a bid, only he
had lost the trick of it, and mostly let 'em drop and broke 'em. As the
old lady had been used to sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one
by one to the old gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the same
way she handed him every item of the family's property, and they disposed
of it in their own imaginations from morning to night. At last the old
gentleman, lying bedridden in the same room with the old lady, cries out
in the old patter, fluent, after having been silent for two days and
nights: "Now here, my jolly companions every one,--which the Nightingale
club in a village was held, At the sign of the Cabbage and Shears, Where
the singers no doubt