Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
So far is his master's wardrobe was concerned, that order was pleasing
to Jackeymo; for the Doctor had in his drawers suits which Jackeymo
pronounced to be as good as new, though many a long year had passed
since they left the tailor's hands. But when Jackeymo came to examine
the state of his own clothing department, his face grew considerably
longer. It was not that he was without other clothes than those on
his back--quantity was there, but the quality! Mournfully he gazed
on two suits, complete in the three separate members of which man's
raiments are composed: the one suit extended at length upon his bed,
like a veteran stretched by pious hands after death; the other brought
piecemeal to the invidious light--the _torso_ placed upon a chair, the
limbs dangling down from Jackeymo's melancholy arm. No bodies long
exposed at the Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than
those respectable defuncts! For, indeed, Jackeymo had been less thrifty
of his apparel--more _profusus sui_--than his master. In the earliest
days of their exile, he preserved the decorous habit of dressing for
dinner--it was a respect due to the Padrone--and that habit had lasted
till the two habits on which it necessarily depended had evinced the
first symptoms of decay; then the evening clothes had been taken into
morning wear, in which hard service they had breathed their last.
The Doctor, notwithstanding his general philosophical abstraction from
such household details, had more than once said, rather in pity to
Jackeymo, than with an eye to that respectability which the costume
of the servant reflects on the dignity of the master--"Giacomo, thou
wantest clothes: fit thyself out of mine!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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