r. She had started him from a small shop to
a big one. He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to start
himself as a gentleman. He was a man of this ambition, and prouder behind
it. But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among
independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the
perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the
source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our time
in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate the
splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that prodigious
nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of Helmstone, he
retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of Crikswich, where he
rented the cheapest residence he could discover for his habitation, the
House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not in total disaccord
with his old mother's principles. His income, as he observed to his
widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was
respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent.
cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster
reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and
a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed
as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the
ladder. An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own
right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets'
daughters every day of the week.

Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of
the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled
ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and
he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he understood it. He
knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken
out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women. The lightning,
only to be warded by an esquire, was in them. He quitted business at the
age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at
least it was one of the ideas in his mind.

And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over
him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is
necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner
could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting mer