s of the London establishments, the
doors for carriages to set down and the doors for carriages to take
up, indicating an affluence of customers, a degree of crowd and
inconvenience equal to the King's Theatre, on a Saturday night, or the
queen's drawing-room on a birthday, and attracting the whole female
world by that which in a fashionable cause the whole female world loves
so dearly, confusion, pressure, heat and noise;--to say nothing of those
bold schemes which require the multitudes of the metropolis to afford
them the slightest chance of success, we in our good borough of Belford
Regis, simple as it stands, had, as I have said, as pretty a show of
speculating haberdashers as any country town of its inches could well
desire; the most eminent of whom was beyond all question or competition,
the proprietor of the New Waterloo Establishment, Mr. Joseph Hanson,
late of London.

His shop displayed, as I have already intimated, one of the largest and
showiest frontages in the market-place, and had been distinguished by a
greater number of occupants and a more rapid succession of failures in
the same line than any other in the town.

The last tenant, save one, of that celebrated warehouse--the penultimate
bankrupt--had followed the beaten road of puffing, and announced his
goods as the cheapest ever manufactured. According to himself, his
handbills, and his advertisements, everything contained in that shop was
so very much under prime cost, that the more he sold the sooner he must
be ruined. To hear him, you would expect not only that he should give
his ribbons and muslins for nothing, but that he should offer you
a premium for consenting to accept of them, Gloves, handkerchiefs,
nightcaps, gown-pieces, every article at the door and in the window was
covered with tickets, each nearly as large as itself, tickets that might
be read across the market-place; and townspeople and country-people came
flocking round about, some to stare and some to buy. The starers were,
however, it is to be presumed, more numerous than the buyers, for
notwithstanding his tickets, his handbills, and his advertisements, in
less than six months the advertiser had failed, and that stock never, as
it's luckless owner used to say, approached for cheapness, was sold off
at half its original price.

Warned by his predecessor's fate, the next comer adopted a newer and a
nobler style of attracting public attention. He called himself a steady
trader of