But as there is really no end to diddling, so there would be none to this essay, were I even to hint at half the variations, or inflections, of which this science is susceptible.  I must bring this paper, perforce, to a conclusion, and this I cannot do better than by a summary notice of a very decent, but rather elaborate diddle, of which our own city was made the theatre, not very long ago, and which was subsequently repeated with success, in other still more verdant localities of the Union.  A middle-aged gentleman arrives in town from parts unknown.  He is remarkably precise, cautious, staid, and deliberate in his demeanor.  His dress is scrupulously neat, but plain, unostentatious.  He wears a white cravat, an ample waistcoat, made with an eye to comfort alone; thick-soled cosy-looking shoes, and pantaloons without straps.  He has the whole air, in fact, of your well-to-do, sober-sided, exact, and respectable “man of business,” Par excellence —­ one of the stern and outwardly hard, internally soft, sort of people that we see in the crack high comedies —­ fellows whose words are so many bonds, and who are noted for giving away guineas, in charity, with the one hand, while, in the way of mere bargain, they exact the uttermost fraction of a farthing with the other.

He makes much ado before he can get suited with a boarding house.  He dislikes children.  He has been accustomed to quiet.  His habits are methodical —­ and then he would prefer getting into a private and respectable small family, piously inclined.  Terms, however, are no object —­ only he must insist upon settling his bill on the first of every month, (it is now the second) and begs his landlady, when he finally obtains one to his mind, not on any account to forget his instructions upon this point —­ but to send in a bill, and receipt, precisely at ten o’clock, on the first day of every month, and under no circumstances to put it off to the second.

These arrangements made, our man of business rents an office in a reputable rather than a fashionable quarter of the town.  There is nothing he more despises than pretense.  “Where there is much show,” he says, “there is seldom any thing very solid behind” —­ an observation which so profoundly impresses his landlady’s fancy, that she makes a pencil memorandum of it forthwith, in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the Proverbs of Solomon.

The next step is to advertise, after some such fashion as this, in the principal business six-pennies of the city —­ the pennies are eschewed as not “respectable” —­ and as demanding payment for all advertisements in advance.  Our man of business holds it as a point of his faith that work should never be paid for until done.