prosperous Portsmouth merchant in the West India trade, a man of many
attainments, who had failed and died of a broken heart; and William, at
two and twenty, was a clerk in the little jewellery shop of Mr. Judson in
Cornhill.

William Wetherell had literary aspirations, and sat from morning till
night behind the counter, reading and dreaming: dreaming that he was to
be an Irving or a Walter Scott, and yet the sum total of his works in
after years consisted of some letters to the Newcastle Guardian, and a
beginning of the Town History of Coniston!

William had a contempt for the awkward young countryman who suddenly
loomed up before him that summer's morning across the counter. But a
moment before the clerk had been in a place where he would fain have
lingered--a city where blue waters flow swiftly between white palaces
toward the sunrise.

"And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking toward the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below."

Little did William Wetherell guess, when he glanced up at the intruder,
that he was looking upon one of the forces of his own life! The
countryman wore a blue swallow tail coat (fashioned by the hand of Speedy
Bates), a neck-cloth, a coonskin cap, and his trousers were tucked into
rawhide boots. He did not seem a promising customer for expensive
jewellery, and the literary clerk did not rise, but merely closed his
book with his thumb in it.