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Then the hopes rising in a towering wave only to break in foam on the shoal; the wonders wrought in reconciling adverse interests which, after working together for a week, fell asunder; the annoyance, a thousand times repeated, of seeing a dunce decorated with the Legion of Honor, and preferred, though as ignorant as a shop-boy, to a man of talent.
Obliged to rise before daybreak, by turns shop-boy, clerk, and laborer, he was made to bear alone all the work of a trade of which his master reaped all the profits. In truth, this latter had a peculiar talent for making the most of the labor of other people. Though unfit himself for the execution of any kind of work, no one knew better how to sell it.
Doubtless the recipe for that result has been the same for individuals ever since the world rolled, but only here and there a great king, who was also a great genius, possessed it in the earlier times; it took all the ages that preceded it to make the blasé age, and Byron, pre-eminently, to speak its mind in English which he had no sooner done than every nineteenth-century shop-boy in England quoted Byron, wore his shirt-collar open, and execrated his destiny.
The disease stole on through the village, as if it had been left to work its own way; from day to day tidings came abroad of another and another who was down in the fever, the Tuckers' maidservant, Mr Hill's shop-boy, poor Mrs Paxton, always sure to be ill when anybody else was, and all John Ringworth's five children.
Here, after the labours of the day, come the tradesman with his wife and family, the young clerk with his betrothed and also her mother, alack and well-a-day! the soldier with his sweetheart, the students in twos and threes, the little grisette with her cousin, the shop-boy and the workman.
But these attractions did not appear to bring many customers inside the little shop, as the passersby seemed chiefly eager to gain the Vly Market, where the stalls were crowded with purchasers who were getting the good things there displayed to indulge in keeping New Year's day with the proper spirit of festivity; and the shop-boy was about to slip inside for the comfort of warming his fingers and toes, when a tall, slender fellow in fisherman's dress accosted him.
To exchange comments with them would be a keen delight. As for him he had a shop-boy on one hand and a grocer's wife on the other. By the end he had fallen into fatigue. Amid clamour of easily-won applause he made his way into the street, to find himself in a heavy downpour of rain.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century many of the comfortable burghers of Paris owned little villas in the suburbs, whither the family retired on Sundays, sometimes taking the shop-boy as an especial favor.
"Here am I," soliloquised Mr Blurt with a touch of bitterness, "in the position of a shop-boy, in possession of a shop towards which I entertain feelings of repugnance, seeing that it has twice ruined my poor brother, and in regard to the details of which I know absolutely nothing.
His master died, and an ironmonger of the same town took him as shop-boy, and from this he passed on to a druggist and grocer. Until now, although fifteen years old, he had shown no preference for one trade more than another, but it was now necessary he should choose some profession, and his share in the family property amounted to the modest sum of three thousand five hundred livres.
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