SECURE ONES.

“I mak Sicker.”—Motto of the Family of Kirkpatrick.

“Oh, he’s a sicker ane!” is a phrase used in Scotland in reference to that class of people who make excessively sure about every thing, and are in no manner of means to be imposed upon. I style such persons Secure Ones, in orderto be intelligible to southern as well as northern readers. Every body must know a certain class of secure ones by the timid cautiousness and exactness of their behaviour; by the trim, unostentatious propriety of their external aspect. There is a lambs’-woollery comfort and a broad-cloth completeness about this sort of secure one, that nobody can mistake; he even seems to have made the number of buttons in his vest, and the height to which that garment is buttoned up, a matter of accurate calculation. He could not go abroad under less than a certain press of flannel and great-coat for the world; and you might almost as soon expect to meet him without his left arm as minus the silk umbrella under it. (He carries the latter part of himself, or fifth limb, at an angle of about sixty degrees to the horizon, the handle down behind, and the point forked up in front.) When he observes any part of the pavement railed off, in order to save the passengers all danger from an occasional pelleting of stones and bits of plaster which the slaters or chimney-doctors are producing from above, he deploys into the street a good way before coming up to the actual rail or rope, and, in passing, takes care to sweep several good yards beyond the utmost range of shot. “Don’t like these things coming peppering down that way; might almost dislocate one’s shoulder if they were to fall upon it; perhaps we had better go over to the other side of the street altogether. No need, you know, for running into unnecessary danger.” When a secure one ascends a stair, he goes step after step monotonously on, performing every move of his feet with a sound, conscientious deliberation, and seems determined upon doing full justice to every landing-place. He holds firmly, however unnecessarily, by the baluster, since the baluster is there, and he has an obvious satisfaction in the slight pant which he thinks himself entitled to get up on the occasion. The secure one always shuts a door carefully behind him. He takes off his hat softly, with a regard at once to the smooth economy of his hair, and the pile of his chapeau.He has a maxim that the hat should be first raised and loosened from behind, where it slides up along the glossy hair, not from the front, where it encounters a comparative obstruction from the fleshy brow. He lays down his gloves neatly on the top of each other, and hangs up his hat with an air of carefulness truly exemplary. The secure one is a bit of an epicure. When out in the forenoon, he would not for any consideration take lunch or wine. “Madam, would you have me spoil my appetite for dinner?” This appetite he nurses and cherishes in the course of his saunterings between two and five, as carefully as a miser doting over his heap. He holds a telegraphic communion with his inner man that passeth show; he coquets and dallies with his stomach; every indescribable symptom is taken into account, and forms the subject of unexpressed congratulation. “Dear tender flowers of appetite, it would be sacrilege, or worse, to nip ye in the bud, by powdering over you the baneful dew of a glass of Bucellas, or the still more odious blight of a basin of mulligatawny. No, I will coax you, and protect you, andtravelfor you, in faithful love and kindness, even until ye shall be fully fattened up for slaughter at five o’clock.” When the secure one sits down to table, he painsfully and not unostentatiously (to himself) relieves the one lowest button of his vest from the thrall of button-hole, and with equally deliberate care arranges a napkin over the front of his person. Dinner is a sacred ceremony, and requires its canonicals. Being fully acquainted with the whole planisphere of the table, he takes an exactly proportioned quantity of each article, so as ultimately to have enjoyed each in its exact proportion of merit, and to have precisely enough out of the whole. A secure one is frequently an old respectable unmarried gentleman, residing with a single servant—Jenny—in a “self-contained” house about Stockbridge or Newington. Knowing the distance at which he lives from the mercantile parts of the town, he takes care never to want what he calls a pound of change,as well as a small stock of copper—at least the value of a shilling—observing also that the change is not unmixed with sixpences, so that when any shopkeeper’s boy calls for payment of an account, or to take back the purchase-money of any article he has bought that day in town, he may not have to trouble [i. e.trust] the messenger with the duty of obtaining change for a bank note, which would tend to occasion a more than necessary answering of the bells at the door, besides keeping him in an agony of fiddle-faddle till the little affair was settled. Jenny, who has been so long in his service as to have become almost as secure as himself, never opens the door o’ nights without putting on the chain; and she has a standing order against all parleying with beggars, or poor women who sell tapes and such things out of baskets. The secure one regards few creatures in this world with a more jealous or malignant eye than these personages. “Why, Sir, they want nothing but to make an opportunity of stripping the lobby or the kitchen!” And such a story he can tell of a missing hat-brush! “A woman seen that morning going about—sold a pair of garters to the maid-servant three doors off at ten—front door had been left open for a minute, not more, while Jenny ran after me with something I had forgot—and in that time—it could have been at no other—the deed was done. A hat-brush I had just got with my last hat at Grieve and Scott’s; had a thing that screwed in at the one end, so that it was a stretcher also; cost four and sixpence, even taking the hat along with it.” And the secure one, without any premeditated hard-heartedness, thinks nothing of making such an incident apologize to himself for an habitual shutting of his door and his heart against the poor for the next twelvemonth. There is never any imperfection in theexterneof the secure one. He bears about him a certain integrality of look that fills and satisfies the eye. From his good well-brushed waterproof beaver, all along down by his roomy blue coat, drab well-fledged, amply-trousered limbs, and so down to hisdoubleshoes, not omitting such points as his voluminous white neckcloth without collar, his large Cairngorm brooch, which looks as if a dish of jelly had been inverted into his bosom, and his heavy, pursy bunch of seals dangling, clearly defined and well relieved, from the precipice of belly—every thing betokens the secure one. Clothes are not so much clothes with him as they are a kind of defensive armour! The truth is, the secure one lives in a state of constant warfare with the skiey influences. The chief campaign is in winter. Instead of entering the field, like Captain Bobadil, about the tenth of March, he opens the trenches towards the twenty-fourth of October. He then invests himself with a cuirass of wool almost thick enough to obstruct the passage of a cannon-ball. For months after, he remains in arms, prepared to stand out against the most violent attacks of the enemy, and, in reality, there is hardly any advantage to be got of the secure one by fair open storms or frosts. He bears a charmed life against all such candid modes of warfare. He cannot be overthrown in a pitched battle. It is only ambuscade draughts through open windows, and other kinds of bush-fighting, that ever are of any effect against him. Like Hector in the armour of Patroclus, he is invulnerable over almost all his whole person; but an arrowy rheumatism, like the spear of Achilles, will sometimes reach him through a very small chink. Like the mighty Achilles himself, he is literally proof, perhaps, against every thing but what assails him through the very lowest part of his person—he can stand every thing but wet feet. There is an instance on record of his having once been laid by the heels for three months, in consequence of sitting one night in the pit of the Theatre with a slightly damp umbrella between his knees. He was just about to get entirely better of this disorder, when all at once he was thrown back for six weeks more, by reason, as he himself related, of his having changed the wear (in his sick-chamber) of a silk watch-riband for a chain! “All from the imprudence of that rash girl Jenny, whothought the riband a little shabby, and put on the chain instead. Why, Sir! a thick double riband, more than an inch broad; only conceive what a material addition it must have been to my ordinary clothing!” The chain, he might have added, was apt to be worse than nothing, for it was of irregular application, tattooing his person, as it were, with a minutely decussated exposure, so that the cold was likely to have struck him as with the teeth of a comb! The secure one has an anxiety peculiar to himself on the subject of easy-chairs, nightgowns, and slippers. The easy-chair must be exact in angle to a single minute of a degree; the nightgown must be properly seen to in respect of fur and flannel; the slippers must every night be placed for him at the proper place; and if Jenny has been so inattentive as to place the left one on the right of the other, he feels himself not a little discomposed. The secure one is most pestilently and piquantly accurate about all things. He loves to arrange, and arrange, and arrange, and over again arrange and settle all the preliminaries and pertinents of any little matter which cannot reasonably be done but one way. If he wishes, for instance, to confer with an upholsterer respecting some alteration in the above easy-chair, he first calls one forenoon, and inflicts an hour’s explanation upon the unhappy man of wood—who is not all a man of wood, otherwise he would, in such a case, be happy. It does not in the least matter at what hour the tradesman should come to see this chair, for the secure one is to be at home the whole day. Yet the very liberty at which he stands produces a difficulty. It would be charity in Providence, by any interference, “to give him not to choose.” “Say eleven; I shall then be quite disengaged—will that hour suit you? Or make it any other hour—say twelve—or say half-past eleven—half-past would do very well.” [He recollects that he seldom gets the whole fiddle-faddle of feeding the canaries over byhalf-past.] “Suppose it were a quarter to twelve; that would answer me better still. I may, perhaps, take a walk outat mid-day; would a quarter to twelve do? Or I might hurry the canaries, and then the half-past might do. I dare say half-past will do best after all; mind half-past eleven,” &c. &c. The man comes, and the business of the chair is entered into. The whole affair is most amply canvassed. The secure one sits down in it, and gives a lecture in a veryex-cathedrastyle upon all its properties and defects. He complains of the back reclining a little too much back, or the bottom showing too little bottom, or some other fault equally inappreciable; and the upholsterer sees at once that the secure one only complains of this, as he is apt to do of other things, for the very uneasiness arising from its over-easiness.

“Lulled on the rack of a too-easy chair.”

The fact is, the secure one has brought every appliance of life to such an absolute exactitude and perfection, that, having no longer any thing to give him pain, he becomes quite wretched. Secureness, it is evident, may go too far. We may become actually frightened in this world at our own caution. We may be shocked by the very unimpeachability of our own virtue. We may become miserable through the extremity of our happiness. In the same manner the secure one, when he has “got all things right,” as he would say, finds himself, to his great disappointment, just at the threshold of woe and evil. He has exactly got time to set his house in order, before the proper consequence of such an event befalls him; and he expires at the very moment when he has just completed his preparations to live.

There is another order of secure ones, whose carefulness refers rather to their wealth than their health. There is an awful inviolability of pocket about such men—a provoking guardedness against all the possible appeals of friendship, and all the impulses of benevolence. Such men look as if they were all stanchioned over.La Pucelleitself was not more perfectly fortified than their breeches. A poorer man is apt to feel in their presence as if he wereunder an indictment for an intention either to beg or borrow, or, perhaps, to steal from them. He sees something criminative against himself in every impregnable-looking button. Secure ones of this class, perhaps, are bachelors under forty—careful, circumspect men, that have passed through the ordeal of a thousand evening parties without ever being in the least danger. They abstain from marrying, from very fear lest any advantage should be got of them. They cannot enter into the slightest intercourse with a young lady, without letting it appear that they are perfectly on their guard. The most undesigning girl, like the above poor man, feels in their presence as if she were liable to be construed into an absolute “drapery miss.” He is always quite civil, but that is from his verysecureness: he knows he is in no danger. An experienced woman gives up a man of this kind at first sight. She sees he is cook’s meat,i. e.that he is to marry a middle-aged kitchen woman at fifty, upon the ground of her proficiency in preparing a beef-steak. The general feeling of the sex regarding this sort of secure one is, “Confound the fellow! does he think that any one cares for him, or would take him though he were willing?”

“Nobody wants you, Sir, she said.”

The secure one, however, does not appear ever to suppose that the ladies have a veto in proposals of marriage. He looks upon them all as a class so eager on capturing and entrapping men, that it never enters into his head that there is such a thing as a rejected offer. The man he considers to be the passive and accepting party; the lady is the besieging enemy, and he is the fortress; the marriage takes place only ifhechooses. It may be supposed, then, what would be the state of a secure one’s mind, if he were to relent some fine day in a fit of generosity (a thing only to be supposed in the event of his becomingfey), and in a liberal, candid, honourable manner, offer his hand to a young lady of little fortune, whom he was disposed to think suitable on the score of personal merit alone, but who having some prior attachment to aman one-half as old, and twice as generous, was under the necessity of only thanking him for the honour. The cook or any thing after that! And how the whole sex would rejoice in his calamity!! “A fellow, forsooth, that has been a living insult to the tribe of womankind all his days. He is well served.”

There is another kind of secure one, considerably different in circumstances from the above—a married man about sixty, with a large family, in which there are several grown daughters. These girls are constantly under his eye. At church he puts them into a pew, and sits down at the door himself, as if he were a kind of serpent guarding the Hesperian fruit. To the eyes of hundreds of young men under twenty, who are not yet considered to be sufficiently settled in the world to marry, these young ladies seem unapproachable as the top of the steeple. They look as if they were absolutely walled round with jealous andsecurepaternity. One after another they are taken off by middle-aged cousins and other distant relations, about whose “respectability” there can be no doubt; and the young men in the back pew sigh to see that the family is determined upon being self-contained. For it is one of those families, perhaps, who enjoy the credit of a great deal of vague, and not very strictly apportioned wealth, under the clause, “There’s plenty o’ siller amang them;” and who seem as if they would consider the admission of a stranger into the circle as a thing of some danger, however “respectable” he might appear.

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