Within, a shining counter of mahogany laden with cures for the various ills which flesh is heir to; and at the far end, a neat little glass screen with a gas-jet on top, above which could be seen the gray-black head of Mr. Wosk and the smooth red head of Mr. Wosk's assistant.
Mr. Wosk (who was also the Co.) was a slender, serious man, always clothed in black, with a sedate, black-bearded countenance, a habit of washing his hands with invisible soap and water, and a rasping little cough, which he introduced into his conversation at inopportune moments. He would have made an excellent undertaker, an ideal mute, for his cast of countenance was undeniably mournful, but Fate had fitted this round peg of an undertaker into the square hole of a chemist in a fit of perverse anger. He bore up, however, against his uncongenial situation with dreary resignation, and dispensed his own medicines with an air of saying, "I hope it will do you good, but I'm afraid it won't." He was the pillar of the Church in a small way, and stole round the chapel on Sundays with the plate in a melancholy fashion, as if he was asking some good Christian to put some food on the plate and despaired of getting it. Ebenezer was his name, and his wife, an acidulated lady of uncertain age, ruled him with a rod of iron, perhaps from the fact that she had no children over whom to domineer.
Mrs. Wosk, however, could not rule the assistant, much as she desired to do so. Not that he made any show of opposition, but always twisted this way and turned that in an eel-like fashion until she did not know quite where to have him. In fact, the assistant ruled Mrs. Wosk (of which rule she had a kind of uneasy consciousness), and as Mrs. Wosk ruled Mr. Wosk, including the Co., M. Jules Guinaud may have been said to have ruled the whole household.
A hard name to pronounce, especially in Ironfields, where French was in the main an unknown tongue, so suburban Ironfields, by common consent, forgot the surname of the assistant, and called him, in friendly fashion, Munseer Joolees, by which appellation he was known for a considerable time. Mrs. Wosk, however, who meddled a good deal with the shop and saw a good deal of the assistant, being learned in Biblical lore (as the wife of a deacon should be), found a certain resemblance suggested by the name and appearance of the assistant between Munseer Joolees and Judas Iscariot, whereupon, with virulent wit, she christened him by the latter name, and Monsieur Joolees became widely known as Monsieur Judas, which name pleased the Ironfields worthies, being easy to pronounce and containing a certain epigrammatic flavour.