As he turned into the avenue himself, Miss Merry,
who was far ahead, happened to look back.
‘Ah!’ said Jonas, with a sullen smile,
and a nod that was not addressed to her. ’Make
the most of it while it lasts. Get in your hay
while the sun shines. Take your own way as long
as it’s in your power, my lady!’
Is in part professional, and
furnishes the reader with some
valuable hints in relation to
the management of A sick chamber
Mr Mould was surrounded by his household gods.
He was enjoying the sweets of domestic repose, and
gazing on them with a calm delight. The day being
sultry, and the window open, the legs of Mr Mould were
on the window-seat, and his back reclined against
the shutter. Over his shining head a handkerchief
was drawn, to guard his baldness from the flies.
The room was fragrant with the smell of punch, a tumbler
of which grateful compound stood upon a small round
table, convenient to the hand of Mr Mould; so deftly
mixed that as his eye looked down into the cool transparent
drink, another eye, peering brightly from behind the
crisp lemon-peel, looked up at him, and twinkled like
a star.
Deep in the City, and within the ward of Cheap, stood
Mr Mould’s establishment. His Harem, or,
in other words, the common sitting room of Mrs Mould
and family, was at the back, over the little counting-house
behind the shop; abutting on a churchyard small and
shady. In this domestic chamber Mr Mould now
sat; gazing, a placid man, upon his punch and home.
If, for a moment at a time, he sought a wider prospect,
whence he might return with freshened zest to these
enjoyments, his moist glance wandered like a sunbeam
through a rural screen of scarlet runners, trained
on strings before the window, and he looked down, with
an artist’s eye, upon the graves.
The partner of his life, and daughters twain, were
Mr Mould’s companions. Plump as any partridge
was each Miss Mould, and Mrs M. was plumper than the
two together. So round and chubby were their fair
proportions, that they might have been the bodies once
belonging to the angels’ faces in the shop below,
grown up, with other heads attached to make them mortal.
Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and distended,
as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial
trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who
were depicted as constantly blowing those instruments
for ever and ever without any lungs, played, it is
to be presumed, entirely by ear.
