The Monikins | Page 9

a wag, "Make me your executor, father; I care not to
whom you leave the estate." Let all this be as it might, nothing can be
more certain than that my worthy ancestor executed his trust with the
scrupulous fidelity of a man whose integrity had been severely
schooled in the ethics of trade. Little Betsey was properly educated for
one in her condition of life; her health was as carefully watched over as
if she had been the only daughter of the sovereign instead of the only
daughter of a fancy-dealer; her morals were superintended by a
superannuated old maid; her mind left to its original purity; her person
jealously protected against the designs of greedy fortune-hunters; and,
to complete the catalogue of his paternal attentions and solicitudes, my
vigilant and faithful ancestor, to prevent accidents, and to counteract
the chances of life, so far as it might be done by human foresight, saw
that she was legally married, the day she reached her nineteenth year, to
the person whom, there is every reason to think, he believed to be the
most unexceptionable man of his acquaintance-- in other words, to
himself. Settlements were unnecessary between parties who had so
long been known to each other, and, thanks to the liberality of his late
master's will in more ways than one, a long minority, and the industry
of the ci-devant head shopman, the nuptial benediction was no sooner
pronounced, than our family stepped into the undisputed possession of
four hundred thousand pounds. One less scrupulous on the subject of
religion and the law, might not have thought it necessary to give the
orphan heiress a settlement so satisfactory, at the termination of her
wardship.
I was the fifth of the children who were the fruits of this union, and the
only one of them all that passed the first year of its life. My poor
mother did not survive my birth, and I can only record her qualities
through the medium of that great agent in the archives of the family,
tradition. By all that I have heard, she must have been a meek, quiet,
domestic woman; who, by temperament and attainments, was
admirably qualified to second the prudent plans of my father for her
welfare. If she had causes of complaint, (and that she had, there is too
much reason to think, for who has ever escaped them?) they were
concealed, with female fidelity, in the sacred repository of her own
heart; and if truant imagination sometimes dimly drew an outline of

married happiness different from the fact that stood in dull reality
before her eyes, the picture was merely commented on by a sigh, and
consigned to a cabinet whose key none ever touched but herself, and
she seldom.
Of this subdued and unobtrusive sorrow, for I fear it sometimes reached
that intensity of feeling, my excellent and indefatigable ancestor
appeared to have no suspicion. He pursued his ordinary occupations
with his ordinary single-minded devotion, and the last thing that would
have crossed his brain was the suspicion that he had not punctiliously
done his duty by his ward. Had he acted otherwise, none surely would
have suffered more by his delinquency than her husband, and none
would have a better right to complain. Now, as her husband never
dreamt of making such an accusation, it is not at all surprising that my
ancestor remained in ignorance of his wife's feelings at the hour of his
death.
It has been said that the opinions of the successor of the fancy- dealer
underwent some essential changes between the ages of ten and forty.
After he had reached his twenty-second year, or, in other words, the
moment he began to earn money for himself, as well as for his master,
he ceased to cry "Wilkes and liberty!" He was not heard to breathe a
syllable concerning the obligations of society toward the weak and
unfortunate, for the five years that succeeded his majority; he touched
lightly on Christian duties in general, after he got to be worth fifty
pounds of his own; and as for railing at human follies, it would have
been rank ingratitude in one who so very unequivocally got his bread
by them. About this time, his remarks on the subject of taxation,
however, were singularly caustic, and well applied. He railed at the
public debt, as a public curse, and ominously predicted the dissolution
of society, in consequence of the burdens and incumbrances it was
hourly accumulating on the already overloaded shoulders of the trader.
The period of his marriage and his succession to the hoardings of his
former master, may be dated as the second epocha in the opinions of
my ancestor. From this moment his ambition expanded, his views
enlarged in proportion to his