JEFFERSON SMILASH

PAINTER, DECORATOR, GLAZIER, PLUMBER & GARDENER. Pianofortes tuned.
Domestic engineering in all its Branches. Families waited upon at table
or otherwise.

CHAMOUNIX VILLA, LYVERN. (N.B. Advice Gratis. No Reasonable offer
refused.)

*****

The business thus announced, comprehensive as it was, did not
flourish. When asked by the curious for testimony to his competence and
respectability, he recklessly referred them to Fairholme, to Josephs,
and in particular to Miss Wilson, who, he said, had known him from his
earliest childhood. Fairholme, glad of an opportunity to show that he
was no mealy mouthed parson, declared, when applied to, that Smilash was
the greatest rogue in the country. Josephs, partly from benevolence, and
partly from a vague fear that Smilash might at any moment take an action
against him for defamation of character, said he had no doubt that he
was a very cheap workman, and that it would be a charity to give him
some little job to encourage him. Miss Wilson confirmed Fairholme's
account; and the church organist, who had tuned all the pianofortes
in the neighborhood once a year for nearly a quarter of a century,
denounced the newcomer as Jack of all trades and master of none.
Hereupon the radicals of Lyvern, a small and disreputable party, began
to assert that there was no harm in the man, and that the parsons and
Miss Wilson, who lived in a fine house and did nothing but take in the
daughters of rich swells as boarders, might employ their leisure better