of only two individuals; a
housekeeper and an apprentice. His housekeeper was one Mrs. Dickinson,
a staid, sober, matronly looking personage, who tried very hard, but
not very successfully, to pass for about forty years of age; the good
woman, though called Mrs. Dickinson, was a spinster, and according to
her own account was of a good family, for her great uncle was a
clergyman. She was remarkable for the neatness of her dress, for the
fineness of her muslin aprons, and the accurate arrangement of her
plaited caps. In one respect Mr. Bryant thought that she carried her
love of dress too far, for she would always wear a hoop when her day's
work was done. Mr. Bryant's apprentice, who was at the period of which
we are writing, nearly out of his time, was a high spirited young man,
whom neither Mr. Bryant nor Mrs. Dickinson could keep in any tolerable
order. So far from confining his reading to bibles, prayer-books, and
almanacks, he would devour with the utmost eagerness, whenever he
could lay his hands upon them, novels, plays, poems, romances, and
political pamphlets; he was a constant frequenter of the theatres,
sometimes with leave and sometimes without, for Mr. Bryant was almost
afraid of him; and to crown the matter he was a most outrageous
Wilkite.

Mr. Bryant himself was a neat, quiet, orderly sort of a man, regular
as clockwork, and steady as time, the very pink of punctuality and the
essence of exactness. He had been in business nearly forty years, in
the same shop, conducted precisely in the same style as in the days of
his predecessors; he lacked not store of clothes or change of wigs,
but his clothes and wigs and three cornered hats were so like each
other, that they seemed, as it were, part of himself. His wig was
brown, so were his coat and waistcoat, which were nearly of equal
length. He wore short black breeches with paste buckles, speckled
worsted hose and very large shoes with very large silver buckles. He
was most intensely and entirely a citizen. He loved the city with an
undivided attachment. He loved the sound of its bells, and the noise
of its carts and coaches; he loved the colour of its mud and the
canopy of its smoke; he loved its November fogs, and enjoyed the music
of its street musicians and its itinerant merchants; he loved all its
institutions civil and religious; he thought there was wisdom in them
if there was wisdom in nothing else; he loved the church and he loved
the steeple, and the