Lamb was a clerk in this company thirty years ago. He remembers many of his colleagues. One of them was the cashier, a Welshman named Evans. At work he looked dismal but brightened up at meal times or when visiting or chatting with friends. He used to take roast veal punctually at 2 p.m every day at the neighbouring   coffee house, named Anderton coffee House. His evening visit to his friends were always made puntually at six. Evans was an old bachelor.

 

The Cashier was one Evans,a Cambro-Briton, a Welshman. He wore his hair powdered and frizzed out, the fashion known as Maccaronies. His melancholy face bent over the cash, he ever fumbled with it, fearing the every one about him was a defaulter, including himself too; his face seemed to brighten when he sat over his roast veal at Anderson’s at two. It was not till evening that he really came into life. Just on the stroke of six he would tap at the door. Over a muffin he would melt into talk, ranging over old and new London, and he seemed to have such a lot of information.

Evans had something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history ! His countryman, Pennant himself in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London -- the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay -- where Rosamond's pond stood -- the Mulberry-gardens -- and the Conduit in Cheap -- with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, -- the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials!