Joe was a decent sort of boy enough for his avocation, not
to be ranked among those who "troop under the sooty flag of Acheron;"
but a clean, square-built fellow, with a broadish face and forehead,
blue eyes, nose rather short, expanded, and inclined upwards, and tinted
with that imperial hue that indicated his knowledge was not confined
to dry measure; this, with a mouth a little elongated, formed a
countenance, upon the whole, full of mirth and good-humour. This piece
of device was surmounted by a hat of the usual professional form--a
domed piece of felt, with a most prodigious margin: he wore a good stout
flannel jacket, and waistcoat; his shirt collar fastened by a leaden
brooch, in the shape of a heart, deviating from the general costume.
His continuations were of white drill; but, mark the vanity! short
enough to display a pair of hoppers, otherwise gaiters, of the same
material; these, with a stout pair of ancle-Johns, completed his
outward man of an order "simply Doric."
At Joe's approach, all was stir and bustle; the pigs, to the third and
fourth generation, moved "in perfect phalanx," not "to the Dorian mood
of flutes and soft recorders," but to their own equally inspiring grunt;
varying from the shrill treble to the deep-toned bass. Jewler, too, ran
barking; but with less interested feelings; and his little patron ran
to take the whip.
A few interrogatories on each side, a joke, and its accompanying laugh,
occupy brief space; when, suddenly, a general rush proclaims the load is
strewed upon the ground! a chaotic mass--"old hats, old wigs, old boots,
old shoes, and all the tribe of leather," remnants of all things, the
ends and the beginnings, horticultural fragments and broken crockery,
the hunter's bone and the beggar's rags, pilfered lace suspected, and
the stolen jewel, the lost gold, and the mislaid spoon: and, for a
climax, rejoice! gentle reader--for when the designs of the crafty are
defeated by inadvertence, or otherwise, with the weird sisters, "we
should rejoice! we should rejoice!"--a bill for fifteen pounds, drawn
by a lawyer for expenses, and which was taken to the acceptor by the
dustman, for which he received a considerate remuneration.
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