Mr. Darford had taken his two nephews, Charles and William, into partnership with him: William, who had been educated by him, resembled him in character, habits, and opinions. Always active and cheerful, he seemed to take pride and pleasure in the daily exertions and care which his situation, and the trust reposed in him, required. Far from being ashamed of his occupations, he gloried in them; and the sense of duty was associated in his mind with the idea of happiness. His cousin Charles, on the contrary, felt his duty and his ideas of happiness continually at variance: he had been brought up in an extravagant family, who considered tradesmen and manufacturers as a _caste_ disgraceful to polite society. Nothing but the utter ruin of his father’s fortune could have determined him to go into business. He never applied to the affairs of the manufactory; he affected to think his understanding above such vulgar concerns, and spent his days in regretting that his brilliant merit was buried in obscurity. He was sensible that he hazarded the loss of his uncle’s favour by the avowal of his prejudices; yet such was his habitual conceit, that he could not suppress frequent expressions of contempt for Mr. Darford’s liberal notions. Whenever his uncle’s opinion differed from his own, he settled the argument, as he fancied, by saying to himself or to his clerk, “My uncle Darford knows nothing of the world: how should he, poor man! shut up as he has been all his life in a counting-house?” Nearly sixty years’ experience, which his uncle sometimes pleaded as an apology for trusting to his own judgment, availed nothing in the opinion of our prejudiced youth. Prejudiced youth, did we presume to say? Charles would have thought this a very improper expression; for he had no idea that any but old men could be prejudiced. Uncles, and fathers, and grandfathers, were, as he thought, the race of beings peculiarly subject to this mental malady; from which all young men, especially those who have their boots made by a fashionable bootmaker, are of course exempt. At length the time came when Charles was at liberty to follow his own opinions: Mr. Darford died, and his fortune and manufactory were equally divided between his two nephews. “Now,” said Charles, “I am no longer chained to the oar. I will leave you, William, to do as you please, and drudge on, day after day, in the manufactory, since that is your taste: for my part, I have no genius for business. I shall take my pleasure; and all I have to do is to pay some poor devil for doing my business for me.” “I am afraid the poor devil will not do your business as well as you would do it yourself,” said William: “you know the proverb of the master’s eye.”