With every respect, Your most obedient humble servants, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, Brown, Jones, and Robinson Per George Robinson. George Robinson CHAPTER II. THE EARLY HISTORY OF OUR MR. BROWN, WITH SOME FEW WORDS OF MR. JONES. O Commerce, how wonderful are thy ways, how vast thy power, how invisible thy dominion! Who can restrain thee and forbid thy further progress? Kings are but as infants in thy hands, and emperors, despotic in all else, are bound to obey thee! Thou civilizest, hast civilized, and wilt civilize. Civilization is thy mission, and man's welfare thine appointed charge. The nation that most warmly fosters thee shall ever be the greatest in the earth; and without thee no nation shall endure for a day. Thou art our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end; the marrow of our bones, the salt of our life, the sap of our branches, the corner-stone of our temple, the rock of our foundation. We are built on thee, and for thee, and with thee. To worship thee should be man's chiefest care, to know thy hidden ways his chosen study. One maxim hast thou, O Commerce, great and true and profitable above all others;—one law which thy votaries should never transgress. "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest." May those divine words be ever found engraved on the hearts of Brown, Jones, and Robinson! Of Mr. Brown, the senior member of our firm, it is expedient that some short memoir should be given. At the time at which we signed our articles in 185—, Mr. Brown had just retired from the butter business. It does not appear that in his early youth he ever had the advantage of an apprenticeship, and he seems to have been employed in various branches of trade in the position, if one may say so, of an out-door messenger. In this capacity he entered the service of Mr. McCockerell, a retail butter dealer in Smithfield. When Mr. McCockerell died our Mr. Brown married his widow, and thus found himself elevated at once to the full-blown dignity of a tradesman. He and his wife lived together for
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