there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of
any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is
called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy.
The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Percy branch
of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes whose
industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy
handsome clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked
at the first glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name
over his shop was Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his
shop that evening could come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.

These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal
and the authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had
seen somewhere before), was a small, sturdy fellow, with fine
grey eyes, a square red tie and a square red beard, that he
carried aggressively forward as if he defied anyone to pull it.
The other kept so much in the background in comparison that he
looked almost ghostly in his grey cloak or plaid, a tall, sallow,
silent young man.

The two Scotchmen were interested in seventeenth-century swords.
They were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of
these weapons brought out and rolled clattering about the
counter, until they found two of precisely the same length.
Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative
trophy. Even then they felt the points, poised the swords for
balance and bent them in a circle to see that they sprang
straight again; which, for decorative purposes, seems carrying