The young apothecary soon learned to laugh supremely at this piece of extravagance, palliating his shame by repeating that, to the young, love and folly are constant companions; that a heart like his must always have some object of adoration, whether foolish or otherwise. His own experience entirely warranted the dictum at any rate; for he had had a sweetheart as soon as he was consummately breeched--a sweetheart who almost broke his heart by dividing an orange in his presence with a little boy who had the advantage over him in wearing large frilled collars. Again, in tenderest boyhood, he became possessed with an intense affection for the very tall daughter of a police-sergeant; but she despised him for his stockings. Rising thereat in indignant pride, he resolved at once to make himself renowned, that when Fame should so bruit his merits in the general ear that even the daughter of the policeman should hear the blast, she might learn painfully, and, alas! too late, that genius is not to be judged by its stockings. In pursuit of this end, he forthwith indited some affecting “Lines to E----n,” which were declined with thanks by the editor of the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” mainly in consequence of their being inscribed on paper with an ornamental border, and embellished with original designs, curiously colored. This failure disgusted him with the Muses, especially as he himself half suspected a lack of the poetical leaven. So he determined to turn the current of his ambition into channels better suited to it; and thus, begun out of desire to assuage the wounds his pride had received through the medium of his stockings, and continued afterward for its own sake and by natural bias, he managed to pursue the science of chemistry to very great lengths.
Boyhood, however, with all the follies and crudities of the outer boy, and much of the keen feeling, the trust, the ever misconstrued delicacies of the inner, has now gone by with the young apothecary. He puts all his youth behind him to-day, and advances into steady manhood; for to-morrow he is to be married. That fact fills his shop, and every nook of every chamber thereto pertaining; but particularly in the kitchen, where the fat fingers of the little maid are busy with the promising skeleton of a new cap and many yards of white and blue ribbon, and in the shop parlor, where John sits communing with his soul, the circumambient air is prophetic of it. This shop, it should be said, expensively furnished with such means as his careful mother beguiled her years of widowhood in accumulating for some such purpose, John had entered upon only a few months since. His customers, hitherto, were discouragingly few, perhaps in consequence of his having chosen Doctors’ Commons as the probable Tom Tidler’s ground of his future fortunes; not eligible ground for an apothecary. So he resolved on getting married. He had observed, he said, that “things frequently took a turn” upon such events; and this was the reason he assigned to himself for taking the step at this time. But there were many others.