the old school, abjured cheapness as synonymous with cheating,
disclaimed everything that savoured of a puff, denounced handbills and
advertisements, and had not a ticket in his whole shop. He cited the
high price of his articles as proofs of their goodness, and would bare
held himself disgraced for ever if he had been detected in selling
a reasonable piece of goods. "He could not," he observed, "expect to
attract the rabble by such a mode of transacting business; his aim was
to secure a select body of customers amongst the nobility and gentry,
persons who looked to quality and durability in their purchases, and
were capable of estimating the solid advantages of dealing with a
tradesman who despised the trumpery artifices of the day."

So high-minded a declaration, enforced too by much solemnity of
utterance and appearance--the speaker being a solid, substantial,
middle-aged man, equipped in a full suit of black, with a head nicely
powdered, and a pen stuck behind his ear--such a declaration from so
important a personage ought to have succeeded; but somehow or other
it did not. His customers, gentle and simple, were more select than
numerous, and in another six months the high-price man failed just as
the low-price man had failed before him.

Their successor, Mr. Joseph Hanson, claimed to unite in his own person
the several merits of both his antecedents. Cheaper than the cheapest,
better, finer, more durable, than the best, nothing at all approaching
his assortment of linendrapery had, as he swore, and his head shopman,
Mr. Thomas Long, asseverated, ever been seen before in the streets of
Belford Regis; and the oaths of the master and the asseverations of
the man, together with a very grand display of fashions and finery, did
really seem, in the first instance at least, to attract more customers
than had of late visited those unfortunate premises.

Mr. Joseph Hanson and Mr. Thomas Long were a pair admirably suited
to the concern, and to one another. Each possessed pre-eminently the
various requisites and qualifications in which the other happened to
be deficient. Tall, slender, elderly, with a fine bald head, a mild
countenance, a most insinuating address, and a general air of
faded gentility, Mr. Thomas Long was exactly the foreman to give
respectability to his employer; whilst bold, fluent, rapid, loud,
dashing in aspect and manner, with a great fund of animal spirits, and
a prodigious stock of assurance and concei