“If Uncle Abraham comes, sure he will bring Jacob with him; he always does.  If it were Rachel I would not mind; but I cannot abear Jacob, with his great hairy hands and fat cheeks.  And if I be pert to him, my father chides; and if I be kind, he makes me past all patience with his rolling eyes and foolish ways and words.  I know what they all think; but I’ll none of him!  He had better try for Kezzie, who would jump down his throat as soon as look at him.  She fair rails on me for not treating him well.  Let her take him herself, the loutish loon!”

And tossing her head so that her coverchief required readjusting, Cherry slipped down the narrow wooden staircase into the rooms that lay below.

Kitchen and dining parlour occupied the whole of this floor, which was not the ground floor of the house.  That was taken up by the shop, in which Martin Holt’s samples of wools and stuffs were exposed.  He was more (to borrow a modern expression) in the wholesale than the retail line of business, and his shop was nothing very great to look at, and did not at all indicate the scope of his real trade and substance; but it was a convenient place for customers to come to, to examine samples and talk over their orders.  Martin Holt sat all day long in a parlour behind the shop, pretty well filled with bales and sacks and other impedimenta of his trade, and received those who came to him in the way of business.  He had warehouses, too, along the wharves of Thames Street, and visited them regularly; but he preferred to transact business in his own house, and this dull-looking shop was quite a small centre for wool merchants, wool manufacturers, and even for the farmers who grew the wool on the backs of the sheep they bred in the green pastures.  No more upright and fair-dealing man than Martin Holt was to be found in all London town; and though he had not made haste to be rich, like some, nor had his father before him, having a wholesome horror of those tricks and shifts which have grown more and more common as the world has grown older, yet honest dealing and equitable trading had had its own substantial reward, and wealth was now steadily flowing into Martin’s coffers, albeit he remained just the same simple, unassuming man of business as he had ever been when the golden stream of prosperity had not reached his doors.

But the ground floor of the bridge house being occupied in business purposes, the first floor had of necessity been given up to cookery and feeding.  The front room was the eating parlour, and was only furnished by a long table and benches, with one high-backed armchair at either end.  It overlooked the street and the river, like the living parlour above; and behind lay the kitchen, with a back kitchen or scullery beyond.  From the windows of either of these back rooms the busy cooks could fling their refuse into the river, and exceedingly handy did they find this, as did likewise their neighbours.  Nor did the