ion, 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 merely to do
like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class
by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an--undertaker's pathos
is better t