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Show TOPPERS. "Well, my friends, how passes time with you? With me it seems to hurry along as rapidly as a railroad carriage. If every week had fourteen days, and every day eight-and-forty hours. I should not even then be able to accomplish one-half of what I undertook. Still, in the busiest life there are moments of leisure, and as even those ought to be turned to a profitable purpose, you shall now leave another hint from Old Humphrey. "Many of you know London city, but as to knowing a hundreth part of the strange things which take place there, that is out of the question. My method is, when witnessing a multiplicity of odd occurrences, to treat them as I do blackberries-I pass by a great many, and pick our those only that I like best. "Whoever has been in London in the fruit season, must have heard men, women and children crying out in all directions: ‘Hautboys, fine hautboys.' These hautboys are large strawberries, and are sold in baskets called pottles, which, tapering from the top, go on less and lesser to the bottom. "I was passing along, on a hot day, when a pile of these pottles, in a fruiterers shop, caught my attention. There was one of particularly fine fruit, and I soon had hold of it, but the man cried out in a hurry, ‘Stop, stop, sir! I cannot sell them.'" "‘Cannot sell them!' said I; ‘and for what reason?'" "‘Oh, replied he, ‘I cannot sell them, for they are toppers.'" "Now, these toppers were the largest sized strawberries, picked out on purpose to put on the tops of the other pottles, to make the fruit look better than it really was. ‘Come,' thinks I to myself, ‘If you will not let me have the toppers, you cannot hinder me from taking away the lesson they have taught me.' So I walked off, talking to myself about the toppers. "At the corner of the next street, at a draper's shop, some dozen of good looking handkerchiefs were hanging at the door, and marked at the low price of four pence each. Thinking this no bad opportunity of laying in a stock of half a dozen or a dozen good handkerchiefs for a worthy but poor friend, I entered the shop, but was told that they only sold these handkerchiefs to customers, and that if I had any of them, I must buy something else with them. "Old Humphrey was soon out of the shop again, thinking to himself that he ought to have known better than to have gone into it. The handkerchiefs were nothing in the world but toppers, and were hung at the door to make people believe that things were sold cheaper than they really were. "One of the objects I had in view in my walk, was to buy a leg of mutton, and observing two very fine legs hanging by themselves at a butcher shop, I told the butcher to pull one of them down, for that I had set my mind upon it. "‘The legs are sold sir,' said he; ‘but you may have the shoulders to match them.'" "‘Sold,' replied I, ‘why, if they are sold, what is the use of letting them hang up there?'" "‘Only to show what kind of mutton I sell,' said the butcher." "I saw in a moment that the two legs of mutton were his toppers, and that, of course, he would not part with them. "When I came to Smithfield, I stopped a while for a horse jockey was selling a horse to a young gentleman who appeared to me to have far more money in his pockets than judgment or discretion in his head. The gentleman seemed disposed to fancy a black horse, but the jockey began to puff off a brown one, and talked so much of ‘thorough bred,' ‘courage,' ‘spirit to the backbone,' ‘high action,' ‘sure-footed, fast-going,' ‘free from vice,' ‘quiet as a lamb,' and fifty other puffing phrases, that I thought to myself, ‘Ay! ay! Mr. Horse-dealer, these high-flying terms are your toppers, and will enable you, no doubt, to get rid of your brown horse.'" About an hour after I saw two ladies getting into a coach, they were very gaily dressed, so much so, that the scarf of the one, and the shawl of the other, were quite sufficient to attract attention, but their head dresses struck me more than either the scarf or the shawl, for in one of them was stuck a bunch of artificial flowers almost as big as a besom, and in the other, several ostrich feathers, a foot or two high. ‘More toppers,' thought I, hurrying along; ‘and, perhaps, the heads of the wearers still lighter than the feathers and the flowers. "Having occasion to call on a tradesman to settle an account, I found him in a violent passion with his shopman for a trifling mistake, this grieved me the more, because he had the credit of being a religious man, and a truly religious man will seek for grace to restrain his passions. The tradesman soon after began to talk to me on serious subjects, and quoted several texts of Scripture, but I soon perceived that he was not religious at his heart, and that he merely used the texts of Scriptures as toppers to enable him to pass as a religious character. "Now what shall we say to these things? Why seeing the errors of others, let us try to assist them, and act with Godly sincerity in things spiritual and temporal. Take then the hint of Old Humphrey, bearing in mind, that there are toppers in dress, toppers in trade, and toppers in religion as well as toppers in strawberries.-Extracts from Old Humphrey's Addresses. |