Jim Hull came to Oliver one day in the back parlour. Speak of the great Napoleon’s features resembling a finely cut cameo, Jim Hull’s nose, mouth, and chin were quite as hard, clear and set when he refused every parley or overture of good-fellowship in the shape of refreshment, and put it to his master point-blank: ‘Do you continue of the same mind, Master Oliver, that no alum, nor no other harmless stuff for whitening the bread, be used in the bakehouse, and that all sorts of fancy bread, down to them rolls, be weighed and sold by the pound, like the reg’lar loaf?’ ‘I do, Jim,’ said Oliver concisely. ‘Have you taken it into consideration, sir,’ went on Jim solemnly, ‘that customers as are used to white bread and don’t want brown won’t buy bread which, though it may be made of first-rate flour, looks as if it were compounded of ’alf and ’alf. There’s a deal in the look of a thing in all trades,’ said Jim almost wistfully, ‘and folk is fanciful, and is guided by the look as well as by the taste. Nay, the taste gets trained to prefer what it has been accustomed to. There’s a many will have pepper-dust rather than pepper, and chicory before coffee.’ ‘And bread either flavourless or with a suspicion of sourness or bitterness instead of sweet bread, eh, Jim?’ chimed in Oliver. ‘Then tastes must be reclaimed from their vitiated state for the sake of the tasters, that’s all. I have not become a baker to sell adulterated bread of dubious weight, even if the adulteration were innocent and the weight in favour of the buyer. I mean to sell pure bread, by an exact measure.’ ‘Bread has always been divided into two classes,’ remonstrated Jim, growing stiff and stern again: ‘the plain and the fancy. The plain has been measured by weight, the fancy——’ ‘By fancy,’ interrupted Oliver. ‘But you are aware, Jim, that if any buyer choose to buy, by the pound, cottage loaves which, no less than rolls, go under the head of fancy bread, the baker is bound to sell them by weight, though I do not suppose he can be fined for apportioning them according to fancy if there is no demand to the contrary.’ ‘It ain’t the custom,’ said Jim testily. ‘I crave your pardon, sir, but to put it in that way is to insult an honest man as would not offer less than the bulk of an article for its money’s worth, not though you paid him for doing it in golden guineas. Have you ever thought of that, Master Oliver, of the slur you are ready to cast on other bakers—on your own father, for instance, that always did as he would be done by, and on all as worked under him in responsible situations?’