Hobson's house, where he had often walked in the garden of a Sunday, and been invited to sit down to take a glass of wine. Since he had left their service, the house had added a banking business, which was greatly helped by the Quakers and their religious connexion, and Newcome keeping his account there, and gradually increasing his business, was held in a very good esteem by his former employers, and invited sometimes to tea at the Hermitage; for which entertainments he did not in truth much care at first, being a City man, a good deal tired with his business during the day, and apt to go to sleep over the sermons, expoundings and hymns with which the gifted preachers, missionaries, etc., who were always at the Hermitage, used to wind up the evening before supper. Nor was he a supping man (in which case he would have found the parties pleasanter, for in Egypt itself there were not more savoury flesh-pots than at Clapham); he was very moderate in his meals, of a bilious temperament, and, besides, obliged to be in town early in the morning, always setting off to walk an hour before the first coach.

But when his poor Susan died – Miss Hobson, by her father's demise, having now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the pious and childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle – Mr. Newcome, with his little boy in his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of meeting one Sunday; and the child looked so pretty (Mr. N. was a very personable, fresh-coloured man himself; he wore powder to the end, and top-boots and brass buttons, in his later days, after he had been sheriff – indeed, one of the finest specimens of the old London merchant), Miss Hobson, I say, invited him and little Tommy into the grounds of the Hermitage; did not quarrel with the innocent child for frisking about in the hay on the lawn, which lay basking in the Sabbath sunshine; and at the end of the visit gave him a large piece of pound-cake, a quantity of the finest hothouse grapes, and a tract in one syllable. Tommy was ill the next day; but on the next Sunday his father was at meeting.

He became very soon after this an awakened man; and the tittling and tattling, and the sneering and gossiping, all over Clapham, and the talk on 'Change, and the pokes in the waistcoat administered by the wags to Newcome, »Newcome, give you joy, my boy;« »Newcome, new partner in Hobson's;« »Newcome, just take in this paper to Hobson's, they'll do it, I warrant,« etc., etc.; and the groans of the Rev. Gideon Bawls, of the Rev. Athanasius O'Grady, that eminent convert from Popery, who, quarrelling with each other, yea, striving one against another, had yet two sentiments in common, their love for Miss Hobson, their dread, their hatred of the worldly Newcome; – all these squabbles and jokes, and pribbles and prabbles, look you, may be omitted. As gallantly as he had married a woman without a penny, as gallantly as he had conquered his poverty and achieved his own independence, so bravely he went in and won the great City prize with a fortune of a quarter of a million. And every one of his old friends, and every honest-hearted fellow who likes to see shrewdness, and honesty, and courage succeed, was glad of his good fortune, and said, »Newcome, my boy« (or »Newcome, my buck,« if they were old City cronies, and very familiar), »I give you joy.«

Of course Mr. Newcome might have gone into Parliament; of course before the close of his life he might have been made a Baronet; but he eschewed honours senatorial or blood red hands. »It wouldn't do,« with his good sense he said; »the Quaker connexion wouldn't like it.« His wife never cared about being called Lady Newcome. To manage the great house of Hobson Brothers & Newcome; to attend to the interests of the enslaved negro; to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to head all the public charities of her sect, and do a thousand of secret kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous baby-linen; to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen untired on her knees after a long day's labour, while florid rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions; – all these things had this woman to do, and for near fourscore years she fought her fight womanfully – imperious but deserving to rule, hard but doing her duty, severe but charitable, and untiring in generosity as in labour; unforgiving in one instance – in that of her husband's eldest son, Thomas Newcome, the little boy who had played on the hay, and whom at first she had loved very sternly and fondly.

Mr. Thomas Newcome, the father of his wife's twin boys, the junior partner of the house of Hobson Brothers & Co., lived several years after winning the great prize about which all his friends so congratulated him. But he was after all only the junior partner of the house. His wife was manager in Threadneedle Street and at home. When the clerical gentlemen prayed, they importuned Heaven for that sainted woman a long time before they thought of asking any favour for her husband. The gardeners touched their hats, the clerks at the bank brought him the books, but they took their orders from her, not from him. I think he grew weary of the prayer-meetings, he yawned over the sufferings of the negroes, and wished the converted Jews at Jericho. About the time the French Emperor was meeting with his Russian reverses Mr. Newcome died; his mausoleum is in Clapham Churchyard, near the modest grave where his first wife reposes.

When his father married, Mr. Thomas Newcome, jun., and Sarah his nurse were transported from the cottage where they had lived in great comfort, to the palace hard by, surrounded by lawns and gardens, pineries, graperies, aviaries, luxuries of all kinds. This paradise, five miles from the standard at Cornhill, was separated from the outer world by a thick hedge of tall trees, and an ivy-covered porter's gate, through which they who travelled to London on the top of the Clapham coach could only get a glimpse of the bliss within. It was a serious paradise. As you entered at the gate gravity fell on you, and decorum wrapped you in a garment of starch. The butcher-boy who galloped his horse and cart madly about the adjoining lanes and common, whistled wild melodies (caught up in abominable play-house galleries), and joked with a hundred cook-maids, on passing that lodge fell into an undertaker's pace, and delivered his joints and sweet-breads silently at the servants' entrance. The rooks in the elms cawed sermons at morning and evening; the peacocks walked demurely on the terraces; the guinea-fowls looked more Quaker-like than those savoury birds usually do. The lodge-keeper was serious, and a clerk at a neighbouring chapel. The pastors who entered at that gate, and greeted his comely wife and children, fed the little lambkins with tracts.