John Thomas Tumbler, Jr. was not rich; on the contrary, he was very poor, and, indeed, but little versed in the knowledge of the coin of his country. But John Thomas had that opulence of feeling which supplies the place of wealth, and which wealth itself cannot at all times supply; that internal independence, which buoys up the spirit, and defies adversity. In his youth, he had been industrious, and no boy was more persevering and successful in researches for old copper, nails, bits of lead, and such little valuables; but as he verged into manhood, his ideas expanded, and those pursuits were abandoned, as vocations too insignificant for one who bore the image of the universal Creator. In fact, Mr. Tumbler, Jr. considered it undignified to labor at all, and so determined to lead a life of ease and relaxation.
When first our gentleman came to this resolve, he was tolerably well attired. His coat, though thread-bare, and somewhat greasy in the vicinity of the elbows, looked, nevertheless, partially genteel; and though many parts of it were preserved in a state of adhesion by divers pins, it was still without that symptom of poverty, a patch. His breast, at this interesting period of his life, was defended from the inclemencies of the weather, by a double-breasted velvet vest, which had been manufactured some twenty years before for the comfort of some corpulent citizen, and which now hung about Mr. Tumbler with the graceful foldings of a Roman toga. Of his pantaloons and hat, we shall say little, save that they were somewhat venerable; and of his shirt, we can have _nothing_ to say, he having long since repudiated that garment, as an article of dress totally superfluous.
It was customary with Mr. Tumbler, Jr., in those halcyon days, to drop (or rather, as he expressed it, 'happen') in the coffee-houses, at about eleven o'clock, every day, that being the hour when the lunch was set out for customers. At such times, Mr. Tumbler was frequently known to make some very odd mistakes, such, for example, as drinking the liquor of some other individual, who might have been so negligent as to put his glass down for a moment, while he helped himself to a mouthful of the eatables. But these little errors are incident to an absent-minded man, and might have been passed over unnoticed, had not Mr. Tumbler, on a later occasion, been discovered in the act of abstracting a handkerchief from the coat-pocket of a gentleman who was standing at the bar; for which offence he was very unceremoniously ejected from the premises, with an invitation from the keeper to call, in future, 'once in a great while.'