grocery, toys, books, hats, caps, and bonnets.
If we were good, Jerry sold the marbles, tops,
and story-books with which we were
rewarded. If we were naughty, from Jerry's
shop came rods and canes wherewith to
chastise us. Were we in good health and in
rejoicing mood, Jerry had low-priced fireworks,
or bandits, and Red Rovers, and portraits
of the champion at the Coronation for
tinselling, or of the Seven Champions, bound
in marble paper covers, for us to con and
glory over. Were we ill, and peeking, Jerry
had store of villanous pills and draughts,
and powders more villanous still (which
were taken in sweetmeats, confound them!
and have made us loathe jam and
marmalade ever since); and worse and more
abominable and abominated than all and
any, sold Jerry the much-detested oil of
the accursed castor—that filthy amalgam of
oleaginous globules that floats purulently
on the top of a cup of coffee, or in a wineglass,
to horrify and awe helpless little
children.

When I knew Jerry first, these were the
wares he sold. His Everything Shop was by
no means an extensive repository, being,
indeed, a little nook of a place, wedged in
between the baker's and the butcher's shops.
It had not been painted, glazed, decorated, or
cleaned within the memory of man, and its
window-panes were of some curiously dingy
bottle-glass, with bulls'-eyes in the centre.
On the cornice frieze above the frontage Jerry
had formerly designed to have his name
painted in full: but the artist had stopped
short at "JEREMIAH NU"—and had never
got any further. There was, indeed, no need
for Jerry's Christian or surname to be painted
above his store. He was as well known as the
butcher's trotting pony, the baker's bandy-
legged terrier, or the potman at the Black
Lion; and if any of our servants, or children,
or adults, went, or were sent to fetch anything
from Nutts's, they would find Nutts's
without the name being painted above the
lintel in Roman capitals, I'll warrant you.
The excise requirements touching the license
to sell tea, tobacco, snuff, and pepper—all of
which Jerry sold—were satisfied by a little
mortuary-looking inscription, which few could
read, and nobody did read, on one of the
door-jambs; and this, saving some
disparaging epigrams in chalk upon Jerry
himself, due to some juvenile Juvenals of the
neighbourhood, formed all the writing
displayed upon the doors, walls, or shutters of
the Everything Shop. One of my earliest and
chiefest marvels at Jerry and his establishment
was that he never seemed to be "out"
of anything. If you asked for some recondite
article, such as a pair of scalpels, or an ounce
of Tincture of Benzoin, Jerry would produce
the one or the other with as much alacrity as
though you had ordered a halfpenny ball of
twine, or a hank of tape. His merchandises,
also, though arranged in seemingly the most
heterogeneous and helter-skelter manner,
seemed all marvellously susceptible of being
found when they were wanted, and put away
when they were done with. At first sight,
you would take his shelves to be a confused
mass of red herrings, variegated ribbons,
story-books, glazed calico, arrow-root, Everton
toffee, drugs, children's socks, sugar-candy,
beaver hats, butter and cheese, tracts, York
hams, Irish poplins, band-boxes, fiddle-strings,
japanned tea-trays, raspberry jam, and pickled
anchovies, all thrown together without order,
arrangement, or regularity. There was a
place for everything, and everything had its
place in Jerry's shop; and though, from the
intensely amalgamated nature of the stock,
there was certainly a somewhat saccharine
flavour about the salt, a cheesy twang in the
sugar, a slightly snuffy odour about the
butter, and a sort of olla podrida perfume
about the woven and textile fabrics, everything
was as neatly stowed and arranged in
Jerry's shop as in the store-room of a man-of-war,
or the pledge department of the Mont
de Piété in Paris.

Jerry had no wife alive. "His missus," he
condescended to say when he was
conversational, which was not often, "died a many
years since; "and he was wont afterwards
to jerk his thumb towards a painted abomination
in oils in an ebony frame, wherein a
woman, with a face like a sheep, and a hat
and feathers like a negress, was grinning like
a baboon through what appeared to be a hole
in a red curtain. Her neck being bare, and
encircled by a preposterous necklace, and her
waist about half an inch lower than her armpits,
this performance was conjectured to be
a portrait of the late Mrs. Nutts, and the
period of its execution somewhat proximate
to one thousand eight hundred and two.
Nothing more, however, was known of the
deceased lady, save that she was supposed, at
some period or other anterior to her demise,
to have given birth to Jerry's daughter, Julia
—a pretty, fair-haired little mite of a thing
of some eighteen summers, who would have
been the belle of the village without appeal
or opposition, had she not, poor soul! been
afflicted with some constitutional weakness
of the limbs, which constrained her to wear a
grisly apparatus of irons, and crimson leather,
and Heaven knows what belts and bars. It
was very melancholy to see this poor, helpless,
fair-haired child sitting inertly in her chair in
the little parlour behind the shop, so beautiful
yet so crippled; while her old father, with his
weazened, ill-favoured face and shrunken
limbs, skipped about as actively as a veteran
ape. Jerry was very fond of his daughter,
and if she could have eaten gold, or all the
pickled anchovies and orange marmalade
(things by which he set as great a store, almost,
as money), he would, I believe, have given it
her to eat. Jerry even went to the length of
taking sanitary journeys with her, leaving his
shop to the care of his apprentice. He took