His dress was commonly a bottle-green jacket, single-breasted, and square in the tails; a striped cotton waistcoat; velveteen breeches, and light blue ridge-and-furrow worsted stockings. A watch-chain, of a broad steel pattern, hung glittering before him, at which depended a small gold seal, a white almond-shaped shell, and a perforated Queen Anne’s sixpence. Over all this lower display, suppose that you fasten a clean, glossy linen apron, and you have his entire portrait and appearance.
From very small beginnings he had risen, by careful industry, to a respectable place in society, and was now the landlord of the property he had for many years only rented.
Matters prospered, and he got on by slow but steady paces. Business began to extend its circle around him, and his customers became more respectable and genteel.
In a short time Daniel opened accounts with his banker. His establishment became more extensive; and after the lapse of a few not unimproved years, he took his place in the first rank of the merchants of a populous burgh.
His lengthening purse and respectable character pointed him out as a fit candidate for city honours, and the town-council pitched upon him as an eligible person to grace their board. This was a new field opened for him. His reasoning powers were publicly called into play; and he had, what he had never before been accustomed to, luxurious eating and drinking, and both without being obliged to put his hand into his breeches-pocket. Daniel was a happy man—
No dolphin ever was so gay
Upon the tropic sea.
He now cogitated with his own mighty mind on the propriety of entering upon the matrimonial estate, and of paying his worship to the blind god. With the precision of a man of business, he took down in his note-book a list of the ladies who, he thought, might be fit candidates for the honour he intended them, the merits of the multitude being settled, in his mind, in exact accordance with the supposed extent of their treasures. Let not the reader mistake the term. By treasure he neither meant worth nor beauty, but the article which can be paid down in bullion or in bank-notes, possessing the magic properties of adding field to field, and tenement to tenement.
One after another the pen was drawn through their names, as occasion offered of scrutinising their means more clearly, or as lack-success obliged him, until the candidates were reduced to a couple; to wit—Miss Jenny Drybones, a tall spinster, lean and ill-looking, somewhat beyond her grand climacteric; and Mrs Martha Bouncer, a brisk widow, fat, fair, and a few years on the better side of forty.
Miss Jenny, from her remote youth upwards, had been housekeeper to her brother, a retired wine merchant, who departed this life six years before, without occasioning any very general lamentation; having been a man of exceedingly strict habits of business, according to the jargon of his friends; that is to say, in plain English, a keen, dull, plodding, avaricious old knave.