O Commerce, how wonderful are thy ways, how vast thy power, how invisible thy dominion! Who can restrain thee and forbid thy further progress? Kings are but as infants in thy hands, and emperors, despotic in all else, are bound to obey thee! Thou civilizest, hast civilized, and wilt civilize. Civilization is thy mission, and man’s welfare thine appointed charge. The nation that most warmly fosters thee shall ever be the greatest in the earth; and without thee no nation shall endure for a day. Thou art our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end; the marrow of our bones, the salt of our life, the sap of our branches, the corner-stone of our temple, the rock of our foundation. We are built on thee, and for thee, and with thee. To worship thee should be man’s chiefest care, to know thy hidden ways his chosen study. One maxim hast thou, O Commerce, great and true and profitable above all others—one law which thy votaries should never transgress. “Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.” May those divine words be ever found engraved on the hearts of Brown, Jones, and Robinson! Of Mr. Brown, the senior member of our firm, it is expedient that some short memoir should be given. At the time at which we signed our articles in 185-, Mr. Brown had just retired from the butter trade. It does not appear that in his early youth he ever had the advantage of an apprenticeship, and he seems to have been employed in various branches of trade in the position, if one may say so, of an outdoor messenger. In this capacity he entered the service of Mr. McCockerell, a retail butter dealer in Smithfield. When Mr. McCockerell died, our Mr. Brown married his widow, and thus found himself elevated at once to the full-blown dignity of a tradesman. He and his wife lived together for thirty years, and it is believed that in the temper of his lady he found some alloy to the prosperity which he had achieved. The widow McCockerell, in bestowing her person upon Mr. Brown, had not intended to endow him also with entire dominion over her shop and chattels. She loved to be supreme over her butter tubs, and she loved also to be supreme over her till. Brown’s views on the rights of women were more in accordance with the law of the land as laid down in the statutes. He opined that a _femme couverte_ could own no property, not even a butter tub;—and hence quarrels arose. After thirty years of contests such as these Mr. Brown found himself victorious, made so not by the power of arguments, nor by that of his own right arm, but by the demise of Mrs. Brown. That amiable lady died, leaving two daughters to lament their loss, and a series of family quarrels by which she did whatever lay in her power to embarrass her husband, but by which she could not prevent him from becoming absolute owner of the butter business, and of the stock in trade.