“Get out o' that, I tell you!—go away intirely:—I dissolve the partnership. Go at once, for I'm in a passion.”
“Who cares for you, Michael? Go away yourself. I'll engage you'll find many's the one who wants a partner that's active, and won't mind about capital; but I don't think he'll be a man of property. Why should you crow over me, I'd like to know?—is it bekase you've a cock in your eye?”
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HANDSOME HANDS.
An elderly bachelor of my acquaintance is one of the warmest admirers in the world of a beautiful female hand. “A fine hand,” he will say, “is a vastly fine thing, sir. As I always turned my attention very particularly to that part of the person, and have been king's page, and this, that, and t'other about a court, during many of my best years, the very finest of hands have fallen under my notice. Believe me, I am not at all captious, but merely critical, or in a trifling degree historical, when I say, that your fine hands of the present day, are very different from the fine hands of the old school. My father was convinced that bands had degenerated since Charles the Second's time; but he could not help confessing that, in my time,—I mean, when he was seventy, and I was thirty—hands were still handsome. And, mark me, he spoke of hands generally:—but, adad! now, if you meet with a fine hand once in a year or so, you're in luck, and ought to sacrifice a kid to Fortune. The fact is, that fine hands are very much talked about, but they are not properly cultivated; true beauty of form is no longer understood or appreciated; and the classical style of hand is, I fear, almost out of fashion. I am acquainted with two or three exquisite pair in town, and one,—its fellow, unfortunately, is deformed—one matchless hand at Putney. But nobody else admires them; I have them all to myself; and what is most provoking, these treasures,—these living and lovely reliques of a former age of grace and beauty,—these symbols of glorious pedigree,—these aristocratic heir-looms, are thrown away upon persons, who, if it were not for a spice of self-love, and that they're their own, would deem them but middling specimens. They positively try to coax them out of a beautiful into a barbarous style, so as to make them look like those of their neighbours, which the senseless young fellows of the modern school have the bad taste to admire. There never, perhaps, was a woman with such delightful hands as the charming Aurelia Pettigrew, afterwards Mrs. Watts, of Grange Hill, subsequently Mrs. Jervis, of Eton; whom I attempted at once to console and immortalize, by a copy of verses, written on the occasion of her having met with an accident, from an awkward waiting-woman's scissors, which produced a slight, but, in the opinion of many, a pleasing and piquant obliquity of the visual organ. These are the stanzas:—