Christian fiction; Scotland -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
The next day was Saturday, a busy one at the shop. From the neighboring
villages and farms came customers not a few; and ladies, from the
country-seats around, began to arrive as the hours went on. The whole
strength of the establishment was early called out. Busiest in serving
was the senior partner, Mr. Turnbull. He was a stout, florid man, with
a bald crown, a heavy watch-chain of the best gold festooned across the
wide space between waistcoat-button-hole and pocket, and a large
hemispheroidal carbuncle on a huge fat finger, which yet was his little
one. He was close-shaved, double-chinned, and had cultivated an
ordinary smile to such an extraordinary degree that, to use the common
hyperbole, it reached from ear to ear. By nature he was good-tempered
and genial; but, having devoted every mental as well as physical
endowment to the making of money, what few drops of spiritual water
were in him had to go with the rest to the turning of the mill-wheel
that ground the universe into coin. In his own eyes he was a strong
churchman, but the only sign of it visible to others was the strength
of his contempt for dissenters--which, however, excepting his partner
and Mary, he showed only to church-people; a dissenter's money being,
as he often remarked, when once in his till, as good as the best
churchman's.
To the receptive eye he was a sight not soon to be forgotten, as he
bent over a piece of goods outspread before a customer, one hand
resting on the stuff, the other on the yard-measure, his chest as
nearly touching the counter as the protesting adjacent parts would
permit, his broad smooth face turned up at right angles, and his mouth,
eloquent even to solemnity on the merits of the article, now hiding,
now disclosing a gulf of white teeth. No sooner was anything admitted
into stock, than he bent his soul to the selling of it, doing
everything that could be done, saying everything he could think of
saying, short of plain lying as to its quality: that he was not guilty
of. To buy well was a care to him, to sell well was a greater, but to
make money, and that as speedily as possible, was his greatest care,
and his whole ambition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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