And as soon as he began to smack his rosy lips, which nature had fitted up on purpose, over a rasher, or a cut of gammon, or a keg of best Aylesbury, or a fine red herring, no customer having a penny in his pocket might struggle hard enough to keep it there.

For the half-hearted policy of fingering one's money, and asking a price theoretically, would recoil upon the constitution of the strongest man, unless he could detach from all cooperation the congenial researches of his eyes and nose.

When the weather was cool and the air full of appetite, and a fine smack of salt from the sea was sparkling on the margin of the plate of expectation, there was Mr.Cheeseman, with a knife and fork, amid a presence of hungrifying goods that beat the weak efforts of imagination.

Hams of the first rank and highest education, springs of pork sweeter than the purest spring of poetry, pats of butter fragrant as the most delicious flattery, chicks with breast too ample to require to be broken, and sometimes prawns from round the headland, fresh enough to saw one another's heads off, but for being boiled already.
Memory fails to record one-tenth of all the good things gathered there.
And why?
Because hope was the power aroused, and how seldom can memory endorse it! Even in the case of Mr.Cheeseman's wares there were people who said, after making short work with them, that short weight had enabled them to do so.

And every one living in the village was surprised to find his own scales require balancing again every time he sent his little girl to Cheeseman's.
This upright tradesman was attending to his business one cold day in May, 1803, soon after Nelson sailed from Portsmouth, and he stood with his beloved pounds of farm-house butter, bladders of lard, and new-laid eggs, and squares of cream-cheese behind him, with a broad butter-spathe of white wood in his hand, a long goose-pen tucked over his left ear, and the great copper scales hanging handy.