Hobson's house, where he had often walked in the garden of a Sunday, and
been invited to sit down to take a glass of wine. Since he had left their
service, the house had added a banking business, which was greatly helped
by the Quakers and their religious connection; and Newcome, keeping his
account there, and gradually increasing his business, was held in very
good esteem by his former employers, and invited sometimes to tea at the
Hermitage; for which entertainments he did not, in truth, much care at
first, being a City man, a good deal tired with his business during the
day, and apt to go to sleep over the sermons, expoundings, and hymns,
with which the gifted preachers, missionaries, etc., who were always at
the Hermitage, used to wind up the evening, before supper. Nor was he a
supping man (in which case he would have found the parties pleasanter,
for in Egypt itself there were not more savoury fleshpots than at
Clapham); he was very moderate in his meals, of a bilious temperament,
and, besides, obliged to be in town early in the morning, always setting
off to walk an hour before the first coach.

But when his poor Susan died, Miss Hobson, by her father's demise, having
now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the pious and
childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle Mr. Newcome, with his little boy in
his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of meeting one Sunday;
and the child looked so pretty (Mr. N. was a very personable,
fresh-coloured man himself; he wore powder to the end, and top-boots and
brass buttons, in his later days, after he had been sheriff indeed, one
of the finest specimens of the old London merchant); Miss Hobson, I say,
invited him and little Tommy into the grounds of the Hermitage; did not
quarrel with the innocent child for frisking about in the hay on the
lawn, which lay basking in the Sabbath sunshine, and at the end of the
visit gave him a large piece of pound-cake, a quantity of the finest
hothouse grapes, and a tract in one syllable. Tommy was ill the next day;