prosperity the much-despised
British tradesman is not a harsh, he is really a well-disposed, easy
soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments--just
to freshen the account--and a surety that he who debits is on the spot,
to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel.
'Stare aut crescere' appears to be his feeling on that point, and the
departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the
running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that
Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and it
was precisely his doing so which had prevented it from being brought to
a summary close long before. Both Barnes, the butcher; and Grossby, the
confectioner, confessed that they, too, found it hard ever to say 'No'
to him, and, speaking broadly, never could.

'Except once,'said Barnes, 'when he wanted me to let him have a ox to
roast whole out on the common, for the Battle of Waterloo. I stood
out against him on that. "No, no," says I, "I'll joint him for ye, Mr.
Harrington. You shall have him in joints, and eat him at home";-ha! ha!'

'Just like him!' said Grossby, with true enjoyment of the princely
disposition that had dictated the patriotic order.

'Oh!--there!' Kilne emphasized, pushing out his arm across the bar, as
much as to say, that in anything of such a kind, the great Mel never had
a rival.

'That "Marquis" affair changed him a bit,' said Barnes.

'Perhaps it did, for a time,' said Kilne. 'What's in the grain, you
know. He couldn't change. He would be a gentleman, and nothing 'd stop
him.'

'And I shouldn't wonder but what that young chap out in Portugal 'll
want to be one, too; though he didn't bid fair to be so fine a man as
his father.'

'More of a scholar,' remarked Kilne. 'That I call his worst
fault--shilly-shallying about that young chap. I mean his.' Kilne
stretched a finger toward the dead man's house. 'First, the young chap's
to be sent into the Navy; then it's the Army; then he's to be a judge,
and sit on criminals; then he goes out to his sister in Portugal; and
now there's nothing but a tailor open to him, as I see, if we're to get
our money.'

'Ah! and he hasn't got too much spirit to work to pay his father's
debts,' added Barnes. 'There's a business there to make any man's
fortune-properly directed, I say. But, I suppose, like father like son,
he'll becoming the Marquis, too. He went to a gentleman's sc