Young Grindley, alighting from a fourwheeled cab in Fetter Lane, marched up the court, followed by a weak-kneed wastrel staggering under the weight of a small box. In the doorway of the little shop, young Grindley paused and raised his hat.
“Mrs. Postwhistle?”
The lady, from her chair behind the counter, rose slowly.
“I am Mr. Nathaniel Grindley, the new assistant.”
The weak-kneed wastrel let fall the box with a thud upon the floor. Mrs. Postwhistle looked her new assistant up and down.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Postwhistle. “Well, I shouldn’t ’ave felt instinctively it must be you, not if I’d ’ad to pick you out of a crowd. But if you tell me so, why, I suppose you are. Come in.”
The weak-kneed wastrel, receiving to his astonishment a shilling, departed.
Grindley senior had selected wisely. Mrs. Postwhistle’s theory was that although very few people in this world understood their own business, they understood it better than anyone else could understand it for them. If handsome, well-educated young gentlemen, who gave shillings to wastrels, felt they wanted to become smart and capable grocers’ assistants, that was their affair. Her business was to teach them their work, and, for her own sake, to see that they did it. A month went by. Mrs. Postwhistle found her new assistant hard-working, willing, somewhat clumsy, but with a smile and a laugh that transformed mistakes, for which another would have been soundly rated, into welcome variations of the day’s monotony.
“If you were the sort of woman that cared to make your fortune,” said one William Clodd, an old friend of Mrs. Postwhistle’s, young Grindley having descended into the cellar to grind coffee, “I’d tell you what to do. Take a bun-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of a girls’ school, and put that assistant of yours in the window. You’d do a roaring business.”
“There’s a mystery about ’im,” said Mrs.Postwhistle.
“Know what it is?”
“If I knew what it was, I shouldn’t be calling it a mystery,” replied Mrs. Postwhistle, who was a stylist in her way.
“How did you get him? Win him in a raffle?”
“Jones, the agent, sent ’im to me all in a ’urry. An assistant is what I really wanted, not an apprentice; but the premium was good, and the references everything one could desire.”
“Grindley, Grindley,” murmured Clodd. “Any relation to the Sauce, I wonder?”
“A bit more wholesome, I should say, from the look of him,” thought Mrs. Postwhistle.
The question of a post office to meet its growing need had long been under discussion by the neighbourhood. Mrs.Postwhistle was approached upon the subject. Grindley junior, eager for anything that might bring variety into his new, cramped existence, undertook to qualify himself.
Within two months the arrangements were complete. Grindley junior divided his time between dispensing groceries and despatching telegrams and letters, and was grateful for the change.
Grindley junior’s mind was fixed upon the fashioning of a cornucopia to receive a quarter of a pound of moist. The customer, an extremely young lady, was seeking to hasten his operations by tapping incessantly