ing on the margin of the plate of expectation,
there was Mr. Cheeseman, with a knife and fork, amid a presence of
hungrifying goods that beat the weak efforts of imagination. Hams of
the first rank and highest education, springs of pork sweeter than the
purest spring of poetry, pats of butter fragrant as the most delicious
flattery, chicks with breast too ample to require to be broken, and
sometimes prawns from round the headland, fresh enough to saw one
another's heads off, but for being boiled already.

Memory fails to record one-tenth of all the good things gathered there.
And why? Because hope was the power aroused, and how seldom can memory
endorse it! Even in the case of Mr. Cheeseman's wares there were people
who said, after making short work with them, that short weight had
enabled them to do so. And every one living in the village was surprised
to find his own scales require balancing again every time he sent his
little girl to Cheeseman's.

This upright tradesman was attending to his business one cold day in
May, 1803, soon after Nelson sailed from Portsmouth, and he stood with
his beloved pounds of farm-house butter, bladders of lard, and new-laid
eggs, and squares of cream-cheese behind him, with a broad butter-spathe
of white wood in his hand, a long goose-pen tucked over his left ear,
and the great copper scales hanging handy. So strict was his style,
though he was not above a joke, that only his own hands might serve
forth an ounce of best butter to the public. And whenever this was
weighed, and the beam adjusted handsomely to the satisfaction of the
purchaser, down went the butter to be packed upon a shelf uninvaded by
the public eye. Persons too scantily endowed with the greatest of all
Christian virtues had the hardihood to say that Mr. Cheeseman here
indulged in a process of high art discovered by himself. Discoursing
of the weather, or the crops, or perhaps the war, and mourning the
dishonesty of statesmen nowadays, by dexterous undersweep of keen steel
blade, from the bottom of the round, or pat, or roll, he would have away
a thin slice, and with that motion jerk it into the barrel which he kept
beneath his desk.

"Is this, then, the establishment of the illustrious Mr. Cheeseman?"
The time was yet early, and the gentleman who put this question was in
riding dress. The worthy tradesman looked at him, and the rosy hue upon
his cheeks was marbled with a paler tint.

"This is the shop of the 'umble