‘Here’s to him, poor fellow!’ said Kilne; and was deliberately echoed twice.

‘Now, it wasn’t that,’ Kilne pursued, pointing to the bottle in the midst of a smacking of lips, ’that wasn’t what got him into difficulties.  It was expensive luckshries.  It was being above his condition.  Horses!  What’s a tradesman got to do with horses?  Unless he’s retired!  Then he’s a gentleman, and can do as he likes.  It’s no use trying to be a gentleman if you can’t pay for it.  It always ends bad.  Why, there was he, consorting with gentlefolks—­gay as a lark!  Who has to pay for it?’

Kilne’s fellow-victims maintained a rather doleful tributary silence.

‘I’m not saying anything against him now,’ the publican further observed.  ’It ’s too late.  And there!  I’m sorry he’s gone, for one.  He was as kind a hearted a man as ever breathed.  And there! perhaps it was just as much my fault; I couldn’t say “No” to him,—­dash me, if I could!’

Lymport was a prosperous town, and in prosperity the much-despised British tradesman is not a harsh, he is really a well-disposed, easy soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments—­just to freshen the account—­and a surety that he who debits is on the spot, to be a right royal king of credit.  Only the account must never drivel.  ‘Stare aut crescere’ appears to be his feeling on that point, and the departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and it was precisely his doing so which had prevented it from being brought to a summary close long before.  Both Barnes, the butcher; and Grossby, the confectioner, confessed that they, too, found it hard ever to say ‘No’ to him, and, speaking broadly, never could.

’Except once,’said Barnes, ’when he wanted me to let him have a ox to roast whole out on the common, for the Battle of Waterloo.  I stood out against him on that.  “No, no,” says I, “I’ll joint him for ye, Mr. Harrington.  You shall have him in joints, and eat him at home";-ha! ha!’

‘Just like him!’ said Grossby, with true enjoyment of the princely disposition that had dictated the patriotic order.

‘Oh!—­there!’ Kilne emphasized, pushing out his arm across the bar, as much as to say, that in anything of such a kind, the great Mel never had a rival.

‘That “Marquis” affair changed him a bit,’ said Barnes.

‘Perhaps it did, for a time,’ said Kilne.  ’What’s in the grain, you know.  He couldn’t change.  He would be a gentleman, and nothing ‘d stop him.’

’And I shouldn’t wonder but what that young chap out in Portugal ’ll want to be one, too; though he didn’t bid fair to be so fine a man as his father.’

‘More of a scholar,’ remarked Kilne.  ’That I call his worst fault—­shilly-shallying about that young chap.  I mean his.’  Kilne stretched a finger toward the dead man’s house.  ’First, the young chap’s to be sent into the Navy; then it’s the Army; then he’s to be a judge, and sit on criminals; then he goes out to his sister in Portugal; and now there’s nothing but a tailor open to him, as I see, if we’re to get our money.’