Buckle.
I was a good deal taken with Mr. Buckle's apprentice, a rosy-cheeked
young man, whose dress and manners I endeavoured as much as possible
to imitate. I strutted in imitation of his style of walking down the
High Street, and about this time Nurse Bundle was wont to say she
"couldn't think what had come to" my hat, that it was "always stuck on
one side." Pondering the history of Dick Whittington and the fair
Alice, I said one day to Jemima Buckle,
"I suppose you and Andrew will marry, and when Mr. Buckle dies you
will have the shop?"
"Me marry the 'prentice!" said Miss Jemima. And I discovered how
little I knew of the shades of "caste" in Oakford.
Jemima used often to take me out when Nurse Bundle was otherwise
engaged, and we were always very good friends. One day, I remember,
she was going to a shop about half way up the High Street, and I
obtained leave to go with her. Mrs. Bundle was busy superintending the
cooking of some special delicacy for her "young gentleman's" dinner,
and Jemima and I set forth on our errand. It was to a tinsmith's shop,
where a bath had been ordered for my accommodation.
Ah! through how many years that steep street, with its clean, sunny
stones, its irregular line of quaint old buildings, and the distant
glimpse of big trees within palings into which it passed at the top,
where the town touched the outskirts of some gentleman's place, has
remained on my mind like a picture! Getting a little vague after a few
years, and then perhaps a little altered, as fancy almost
involuntarily supplied the defects of memory; but still that steep
street, that tinsmith's shop--_the_ features of Oakford!
I have since thought that Jemima must have had some special attraction
to the tinsmith's, her errands there were so many, and took so much
time.
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