peculiarities interfered with his own, or with the quiet and
beneficial course of his traffic.

Upon the whole, however, the youths were attached to their master, and
he, a good-natured, though an absent and whimsical man, was scarce
less so to them; and when a little warmed with wine at an occasional
junketing, he used to boast, in his northern dialect, of his "twa
bonnie lads, and the looks that the court ladies threw at them, when
visiting his shop in their caroches, when on a frolic into the city."
But David Ramsay never failed, at the same time, to draw up his own
tall, thin, lathy skeleton, extend his lean jaws into an alarming
grin, and indicate, by a nod of his yard-long visage, and a twinkle of
his little grey eye, that there might be more faces in Fleet Street
worth looking at than those of Frank and Jenkin. His old neighbour,
Widow Simmons, the sempstress, who had served, in her day, the very
tip-top revellers of the Temple, with ruffs, cuffs, and bands,
distinguished more deeply the sort of attention paid by the females of
quality, who so regularly visited David Ramsay's shop, to its inmates.
"The boy Frank," she admitted, "used to attract the attention of the
young ladies, as having something gentle and downcast in his looks;
but then he could not better himself, for the poor youth had not a
word to throw at a dog. Now Jin Vin was so full of his jibes and
jeers, and so willing, and so ready, and so serviceable, and so
mannerly all the while, with a step that sprung like a buck's in
Epping Forest, and his eye that twinkled as black as a gipsy's, that
no woman who knew the world would make a comparison betwixt the lads.
As for poor neighbour Ramsay himself, the man," she said, "was a civil
neighbour, and a learned man, doubtless, and might be a rich man if he
had common sense to back his learning; and doubtless, for a Scot,
neighbour Ramsay was nothing of a bad man, but he was so constantly