IX. THE FEASTS OF THE VANDALS 411

all the same. He was a quite first-rate chess-player and whist-player: in business, he had a sort of chess and whist instinct for getting the better of people, as if every dozen of sherry were a hand of cards; and would often, for the mere pleasure of playing a trick, lose a customer without really making a penny by him. Good-natured, as I said, with a rude foundation of honesty at the bottom which made my father put up with him, (indeed, so far as I can find out, no one of all my relations was ever dishonest at heart, and most of them have been only too simple,) he never lied about his sherry or adulterated it, but tried to get little advantages in bargains, and make the customer himself to choose the worst wine at the money, and so on-trying always to get the most he could out of my father in the same way, yet affectionate in a dumb-doggish sort, and not ungrateful, he went scamble-shambling on, a plague to the end, yet through all, a nephew.

182. William, the third of the Perth boys, had all John’s faults of disposition, but greater powers, and, above all, resolution and perseverance, with a rightly foresighted pride, not satisfied in trivial or momentary successes, but knitting itself into steady ambition, with some deep-set notions of duty and principles of conscience farther strengthening it. His character, however, developed slowly, nor ever freed itself from the flaws which ran like a geological cleavage through the whole brotherhood: while his simplicities in youth were even more manifest than theirs, and as a schoolboy, he was certainly the awkwardest, and was thought the foolishest, of the four.

He became, however, a laborious and sagacious medical student, came up to London to walk the hospitals; and on passing his examination for medical practitioner, was established by my father in a small shop in the Bayswater Road, when he began-without purchase of any former favour, but camped there like a gipsy by the roadside,-general practice, chiefly among the poor, and not enough to live upon for a year or two (without supplemental pork

[Version 0.04: March 2008]