Jacob And Allice

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of

blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently

considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed

principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety

for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared

almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can reach a pitch

where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer the slightest excitement? Or

how, at the tender age when a confectioner seems to him a very prince

whom all the world must envy--who breakfasts on macaroons, dines on

meringues, sups on twelfth-cake, and fills up the intermediate hours with

sugar-candy or peppermint--how is he to foresee the day of sad wisdom,

when he will discern that the confectioner's calling is not socially

influential, or favourable to a soaring ambition? I have known a man who

turned out to have a metaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of

youthful buoyancy, commence his career as a dancing-master; and you

may imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by opponents

who felt themselves bound to warn the public against his doctrine of the

Inconceivable. He could not give up his dancing-lessons, because he

made his bread by them, and metaphysics would not have found him in

so much as salt to his bread. It was really the same with Mr. David Faux

and the confectionery business. His uncle, the butler at the great house

close by Brigford, had made a pet of him in his early boyhood, and it was

on a visit to this uncle that the confectioners' shops in that brilliant town

had, on a single day, fired his tender imagination. He carried home the

pleasing illusion that a confectioner must be at once the happiest and the

foremost of men, since the things he made were not only the most

beautiful to behold, but the very best eating, and such as the Lord Mayor

must always order largely for his private recreation; so that when his

father declared he must be put to a trade, David chose his line without a

moment's hesitation; and, with a rashness inspired by a sweet tooth, wedded himself irrevocably to confectionery. Soon, however, the tooth

lost its relish and fell into blank indifference; and all the while, his mind

expanded, his ambition took new shapes, which could hardly be satisfied