gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all
perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish
as by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in
the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the
many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper,
presented themselves before him with the regularity of a
perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as
the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its
variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution
like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their
own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference
to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them.
Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy
condescension, and kind forbearance towards our
stupidity--which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little
short of crime--would he forth-with, by the merest touch of his
finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The
merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His
integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather
than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate
as his to be honest and regular in the administration of
affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very
much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, than an