But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young William: _unde derivatur_? In the beginning, as you should know, this same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or _pot de vin_ to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a ’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in, or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his apprentice _everything_ he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it, it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.” You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his home was in the city.