tenacious, perhaps, than they are in a great bustling metropolis.

And yet that little apothecary who sold a stray customer a pennyworth of
salts, or a more fragrant cake of Windsor soap, was a gentleman of good
education, and of as old a family as any in the whole county of Somerset.
He had a Cornish pedigree which carried the Pendennises up to the time of
the Druids, and who knows how much farther back? They had intermarried
with the Normans at a very late period of their family existence, and
they were related to all the great families of Wales and Brittany.
Pendennis had had a piece of University education too, and might have
pursued that career with great honour, but that in his second year at
Cambridge his father died insolvent, and poor Pen was obliged to betake
himself to the pestle and apron. He always detested the trade, and it was
only necessity, and the offer of his mother's brother, a London
apothecary of low family, into which Pendennis's father had demeaned
himself by marrying, that forced John Pendennis into so odious a calling.

He quickly after his apprenticeship parted from the coarse-minded
practitioner his relative, and set up for himself at Bath with his modest
medical ensign. He had for some time a hard struggle with poverty; and it
was all he could do to keep the shop and its gilt ornaments in decent
repair, and his bed-ridden mother in comfort: but Lady Ribstone happening
to be passing to the Rooms with an intoxicated Irish chairman who bumped
her ladyship up against Pen's very door-post, and drove his chair-pole
through the handsomest pink bottle in the surgeon's window, alighted
screaming from her vehicle, and was accommodated with a chair in Mr.
Pendennis's shop, where she was brought round with cinnamon and
sal-volatile.

Mr. Pendennis's manners were so uncommonly gentlemanlike and soothing,