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One of the most thrifty and thriving tradesmen in the town of Belford, was old John Parsons, the tinman. His spacious shop, crowded with its glittering and rattling commodities, pots, pans, kettles, meat-covers, in a word, the whole batterie de cuisine, was situate in the narrow, inconvenient lane called Oriel Street, which I have already done myself the honour of introducing to the courteous reader, standing betwixt a great chemist on one side, his windows filled with coloured jars, red, blue, and green, looking like painted glass, or like the fruit made of gems in Aladdin’s garden, (I am as much taken myself with those jars in a chemist’s window as ever was Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond,) and an eminent china warehouse on the other; our tinman having the honour to be next-door neighbour to no less a lady than Mrs. Philadelphia Tyler. Many a thriving tradesman might be found in Oriel Street, and many a blooming damsel amongst the tradesmen’s daughters; but if the town gossip might be believed, the richest of all the rich shopkeepers was old John Parsons, and the prettiest girl (even without reference to her father’s moneybags) was his fair daughter Harriet.

John Parsons was one of those loud, violent, blustering, boisterous personages who always put me in mind of the description so often appended to characters of that sort in the dramatis personae of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, where one constantly meets with Ernulpho or Bertoldo, or some such Italianised appellation, “an old angry gentleman.” The “old angry gentleman” of the fine old dramatists generally keeps the promise of the play-bill. He storms and rails during the whole five acts, scolding those the most whom he loves the best, making all around him uncomfortable, and yet meaning fully to do right, and firmly convinced that he is himself the injured party; and after quarrelling with cause or without to the end of the comedy, makes friends all round at the conclusion;–a sort of person whose good intentions everybody appreciates, but from whose violence everybody that can is sure to get away.

Now such men are just as common in the real workaday world as in the old drama; and precisely such a man was John Parsons.

His daughter was exactly the sort of creature that such training was calculated to produce; gentle, timid, shrinking, fond of her father, who indeed doated upon her, and would have sacrificed his whole substance, his right arm, his life, anything except his will or his humour, to give her a moment’s pleasure; gratefully fond of her father, but yet more afraid than fond.

The youngest and only surviving child of a large family, and brought up without a mother’s care, since Mrs. Parsons had died in her infancy, there was a delicacy and fragility, a slenderness of form and transparency of complexion, which, added to her gentleness and modesty, gave an unexpected elegance to the tinman’s daughter. A soft appealing voice, dove-like eyes, a smile rather sweet than gay, a constant desire to please, and a total unconsciousness of her own attractions, were amongst her chief characteristics. Some persons hold the theory that dissimilarity answers best in matrimony, and such persons would have found a most satisfactory contrast of appearance, mind, and manner, between the fair Harriet and her dashing suitor.

Besides his one great and distinguishing quality of assurance and vulgar pretension, which it is difficult to describe, by any word short of impudence, Mr. Joseph Hanson was by no means calculated to please the eye of a damsel of seventeen, an age at which a man who owned to five-and-thirty, and who looked and most probably was at least ten years farther advanced on the journey of life, would not fail to be set down as a confirmed old bachelor. He had, too, a large mouth, full of large irregular teeth, a head of hair which bore a great resemblance to a wig, and a suspicion of a squint, (for it did not quite amount to that odious deformity,) which added a most sinister expression to his countenance. Harriet Parsons could not abide him; and I verily believe she would have disliked him just as much though a certain Frederick Mallet had never been in existence.