is breeches and waistcoat
were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an old-fashioned brown
greatcoat, gray cotton stockings, and shoes with silver buckles to them.
This costume, in which the workman shone through the burgess, was so
thoroughly in keeping with the man's character, defects, and way of
life, that he might have come ready dressed into the world. You could no
more imagine him apart from his clothes than you could think of a
bulb without its husk. If the old printer had not long since given the
measure of his blind greed, the very nature of the man came out in the
manner of his abdication.

Knowing, as he did, that his son must have learned his business pretty
thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been ruminating
for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive with David.
All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to lose, but
in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If, in the first
instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later he came to
regard him as the natural purchaser of the business, whose interests
were therefore his own. Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to
buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty
to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into
self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in
better educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who
demonstrated the superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over book-learned
typography.

David came home, and the old man received him with all the cordiality
which cunning folk can assume with an eye to business. He was as full
of thought for him as any lover for his mistress; giving him his arm,
telling him where to put his foot down so as to avoid the mud, warming
the bed for him, lighting a fire in his room, making his supper ready.
The next day, after he had done his best to fluster his son's wits over
a sumptuous dinner, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, after copious potations,
began with a "Now for business," a remark so singularly misplaced
between two hiccoughs, that David begged his parent to postpone serious
matters until the morrow. But the old "bear" was by no means inclined to
put off the long-expected battle; he was too well prepared to turn his
tipsiness to good account. He had dragged the chain these fifty years,
he would not wear it another hour; to-morrow his son should be the
"gaffer."

Perhaps a