Jenkins,
meanwhile, was articled to his father, and, having passed the
necessary examinations with credit, became a solicitor and married
into a county family.
Thompson, I need hardly tell you, was by this time settled in London
and naturally spent a good deal of his leisure time in Westminster
Abbey. The monuments there profoundly affected his imagination, and
gave him quite new ambitions with regard to the tombstone that towered
at the back of all his day-dreams. When first he trod the Embankment,
in thin boots with a few pence in his pocket, it had appeared to him
in slate with a terrific inscription in gilt letters--inscriptions in
which "Benefactor of His Species," "Take him for All in All We shall
not Look upon his Like Again" took the place of the pettifogging
"Clerk of the Peace" or "J.P." tagged on to the names of the
Jenkinses. By degrees, however, he abated a little of the inscription
and made up for it by trebling the costliness of the stone.
From slate it grew to granite--to marble--to alabaster, with painted
cherubs and a coat of arms.
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