between the pawnshop and the
shop of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world beauty,
for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in itself. The front
window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by a few stars,
by the sparks of what were alleged to be jewels; for it was in brief,
a shop of bric-a-brac and old curiosities. A row of half-burnished
seventeenth-century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of
the window; behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour;
and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or
utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking
them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop, had
its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front
door that opened on the street and a back door that opened on an odd
green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square of gold. There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the
sun a secret lamp of the place.

I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say
that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute
to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he
had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type. But
he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very
well-sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating
the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is
that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called
Thornton Percy. The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton
Percy branch of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes
whose industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy handsome
clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked at the first
glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name over his shop was
Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his shop that evening could
come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.

These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal and the
authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he ha