If there be only one music-seller in the town, he might have his boutique in a twelfth story, and yet he would be sure to get all the natural custom of the place; but in the case of one out of some five hundred haberdashers, or some two thousand grocers, it is absolutely imperative that he should be established in some place with a fatal facility of access. In all cases, there is a combination of qualities in shops, as well as in men and women. There is something indescribable about it; but an experienced eye, pretty well acquainted with the characters of the streets [this is another subject] and parts of streets, could almost in a moment decide upon the probabilities of any given shop in a large city. He would combine in an instant in his own mind the various qualities, and, counting them into each other after the manner of Lieutenant Drummond, but by a figureless kind of arithmetic, assign at once the exact value of the shop to any class of traders. And shops have characters, too, in another sense of the word—that is, they have reputations. Let a shop have all the apparent advantages in the world, yet, if it be a shop in which several persons have committed _faux pas_ in business, it is naught. We often see an excellent shop thus lose caste, as it were, and become of hardly any value to its proprietor. Suppose some one has failed in it between terms, and deserted it: then do all the bill-stickers come in the first place, and paste it over with huge placards from top to bottom, exactly as a man drowned in the sea, however fine a fellow he may have been, gets encased in a few days in barnacles and shell-fish, the conchological part of the world taking that opportunity to show their contempt for the human. Though the character of the shop is not yet, perhaps, at its worst, yet, as it happens to remain unleased over the next term, the despairing landlord, some time in September or October, begins to let it “by the month or week” to all kinds of nameless people, who die and make no _sign_, such as men that show orreries, or auctioneers selling off bankrupt stocks, till at last it is as hopeless to think of getting a good tenant into it, as for a man with a bad character to expect a good place in the Excise. The shop is marked for ever; and unless, like the man in the Vicar of Wakefield, it can get a thoroughly new face and form, it has no chance whatsoever of resuming its place in the first rank of shops.