Joe Stimpson is a tanner and leather-seller in Bermondsey, the architect of his own fortune, which he has raised to the respectable elevation of somewhere about a quarter of a million sterling.  He is now in his seventy-second year, has a handsome house, without and pretension, overlooking his tanyard.  He has a joke upon prospects, calling you to look from the drawing-room window at his tanpits, asking you if you ever saw any thing like that at the west end of the town; replying in the negative, Joe, chuckling, observes that it is the finest prospect he ever saw in his life, and although he has been admiring it for half a century, he has not done admiring it yet.  Joe’s capacity for the humorous may be judged of by this specimen; but in attention to business few can surpass him, while his hospitality can command a wit whenever he chooses to angle for one with a good dinner.  He has a wife, a venerable old smiling lady in black silk, neat cap, and polished shoes; three daughters, unmarried; and a couple of sons, brought up, after the London fashion, to inherit their father’s business, or, we might rather say, estate.

Why the three Miss Stimpsons remain unmarried, we cannot say, nor would it be decorous to enquire; but hearing them drop a hint now and then about visits, “a considerable time ago,” to Brighthelmstone and Bath, we are led, however reluctantly in the case of ladies now evangelical, to conclude, their attention has formerly been directed to gentility-mongering at these places of fashionable resort; the tanyard acting as a repellent to husbands of a social position superior to their own, and their great fortunes operating in deterring worthy persons of their own station from addressing them; or being the means of inducing them to be too prompt with refusals, these amiable middle-aged young ladies are now “on hands,” paying the penalty of one of the many curses that pride of wealth brings in its train.  At present, however, their “affections are set on things above;” and, without meaning any thing disrespectful to my friend Joe Stimpson, Sarah, Harriet, and Susan Stimpson are certainly the three least agreeable members of the family.  The sons are, like all other sons in the houses of their fathers, steady, business-like, unhappy, and dull; they look like fledged birds in the nest of the old ones, out of place; neither servants nor masters, their social position is somewhat equivocal, and having lived all their lives in the house of their father, seeing as he sees, thinking as he thinks, they can hardly be expected to appear more than a brace of immature Joe Stimpsons.  They are not, it is true, tainted with much of the world’s wickedness, neither have they its self-sustaining trials, its hopes, its fears, its honest struggles, or that experience which is gathered only by men who quit, when they can quit it, the petticoat string, and the paternal despotism of even a happy home.  As for the old couple, time, although silvering the temples and furrowing