But where all this time were the Spinkses? Where were they whose patronage should have shielded, and whose kindness should have cherished, the unfortunate but still interesting Spimkinses? Alas! they had set out, only a few weeks before, for the Holy Land, with the avowed intention of taking furnished lodgings for at least six months at Jerusalem.
As if this, of itself, were not sufficiently vexatious, Miss Spimkins took it into her head to espouse a gentleman for the very last thing a lady usually thinks of looking for in a husband--his intellect. The origin of her amour is curious. She had read in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the “Confessions of a Wanderer,” who had been shipwrecked on the Thames, at night-fall, off Chelsea Reach; which Confessions were penned in so poetic a spirit, and described so feelingly the horrors of the catastrophe, the hoarse dash of the waves--the howling of the winds--and the subsequent encounter of the vessel against the fourth arch of Battersea bridge, that the susceptible Miss Spimkins was on thorns till she became acquainted with the author. This, by her brother’s intervention, was soon brought about; an invitation to dinner confirmed the intimacy; the lady, like _Desdemona_, loved the Wanderer “for the perils he had passed;” and he, like _Othello_, “loved her that she did pity them.” It has been well said, one marriage makes many: scarcely had his sister embraced the nuptial state, when Thomas handed to the same altar a widow lady, whom he had accidentally met at Margate, and had mistaken for a person of quality, but who had since turned out to be the leading tragic actress of Sadler’s Wells, at a rising salary of eighteen shillings per week, exclusive of benefits. It is but justice to add, that if this young lady brought her husband no fortune, she brought him, what to a sensitive mind is infinitely preferable, two fine boys, one of whom was breeched, the other yet in petticoats.
Such accumulated incidents--calamities he ungratefully called them--occurring to old Spimkins at a period when the mind, having lost the first elasticity of youth, is not yet mellowed down into the philosophy of age, but stands, restless and unsettled, between the two, in a sort of crepuscular condition, heaped “sackcloth and ashes on his head.” He neglected his ledger, he neglected his house, he neglected himself, and, worst of all, he neglected his customers. In fact, for months together, he did nothing but sigh and swear. His family, even in this exigency, could render him not the slightest assistance. His daughter, who still lived with him, had, by a diligent cultivation of the intellect, long since forgotten the household duties of a wife; her husband, as the old man used often to remark, “was of no more use than a cargo of damaged coffee;” and even Thomas--the inspired Thomas himself--had dwindled down into a mere mortal, and now dwelt in aerial seclusion up two pair of stairs at Pentonville. Thus widowed in his age--for his wife, I should observe, had, three months since, transferred herself from his to Abraham’s bosom--the disconsolate grocer abruptly sold his business, pensioned off his daughter and her “Wanderer,” and retired alone, on a small annuity, to a back street in Islington--a memorable illustration of’ the March of Mind and its very peculiar concomitants.