llow,
with a long, thin, parched looking face, and a miserable crop of yellow
beard, which no one could pronounce as anything else than "a dead
failure;" added to this were two piercing ferret eyes, always sore and
with a tear standing in each, or trickling down his fleshless cheeks; so
that, to persons disposed to judge only by appearances, he looked very
like a man in a state of perpetual repentance for his transgressions,
or, what was still farther from the truth, who felt a most Christian
sympathy with the distresses of the poor. In his house, and about it,
there was much, no doubt, to be commended, for there was much to mark
the habits of the saving man. Everything was neat and clean, not so
much from any innate love of neatness and cleanliness, as because
these qualities were economical in themselves. His ploughs and farming
implements were all snugly laid up, and covered, lest they might be
injured by exposure to the weather; and his house was filled with large
chests and wooden hogsheads, trampled hard with oatmeal, which, as they
were never opened unless during a time of famine, had their joints
and crevices festooned by innumerable mealy-looking cobwebs, which
description of ornament extended to the dresser itself, where they
might be seen upon most of the cold-looking shelves, and those neglected
utensils, that in other families are mostly used for food. His haggard
was also remarkable for having in it, throughout all the year, a
remaining stack or two of oats or wheat, or perhaps one or two large
ricks of hay, tanned by the sun of two or three summers into tawny
hue--each or all kept in the hope of a failure and a famine.

In a room from the kitchen, he had a beam, a pair of scales, and a set
of weights, all of which would have been vastly improved by a visit from
the lord-mayor, had our meal-monger lived under the jurisdiction of that
civic gentleman. He was seldom known to use metal weights when disposing
of his property; in lieu of these he always used round stones, which,
upon the principle of the Scottish proverb, that "many a little makes
a muckle," he must have found a very beneficial mode of transacting
business.

If anything could add to the iniquity of his principles, as a plausible
but most unscrupulous cheat, it was the hypocritical prostitution of the
sacred name and character of religion to his own fraudulent impositions
upon the poor and the distressed. Outwardly, and to the eye of men,
he w