The exclamation had been wrung from Solomon Appleyard by the approach of a stout, short man clad in a remarkably ill-fitting broad-cloth suit.
“What, Sol, my boy?”
“It looked like you,” said Solomon. “And then I said to myself: ‘No; surely it can’t be Hezekiah; he’ll be at chapel.’”
“You run about,” said Hezekiah, addressing a youth of some four summers he had been leading by the hand. “Don’t you go out of my sight; and whatever you do, don’t you do injury to those new clothes of yours, or you’ll wish you’d never been put into them. The truth is,” continued Hezekiah to his friend, his sole surviving son and heir being out of earshot, “the morning tempted me. ’Tain’t often I get a bit of fresh air.”
“Doing well?”
“The business,” replied Hezekiah, “is going up by leaps and bounds—leaps and bounds. But, of course, all that means harder work for me. It’s from six in the morning till twelve o’clock at night.”
“There’s nothing I know of,” returned Solomon, who was something of a pessimist, “that’s given away free gratis for nothing except misfortune.”
“Keeping yourself up to the mark ain’t too easy,” continued Hezekiah; “and when it comes to other folks! play’s all they think of. Talk religion to them—why, they laugh at you! What the world’s coming to, I don’t know. How’s the printing business doing?”
“The printing business,” responded the other, removing his pipe and speaking somewhat sadly, “the printing business looks like being a big thing. Capital, of course, is what hampers me—or, rather, the want of it. But Janet, she’s careful; she don’t waste much, Janet don’t.”
“Now, with Anne,” replied Hezekiah, “it’s all the other way—pleasure, gaiety, a day at Rosherville or the Crystal Palace—anything to waste money.”