The Busy Man

A decayed gentleman, who lives most upon his own mirth and my
master's means, and much good do him with it. He does hold my
master up with his stones, and songs, and catches, and such
tricks, and jigs you would admire--he is with him now.

JOVIAL CREW.

By no one has my return to the Hall been more heartily greeted than by
Mr. Simon Bracebridge, or Master Simon, as the squire most commonly
calls him. I encountered him just as I entered the park, where he was
breaking a pointer, and he received me with all the hospitable
cordiality with which a man welcomes a friend to another one's house. I
have already introduced him to the reader as a brisk old
bachelor-looking little man; the wit and superannuated beau of a large
family connection, and the squire's factotum. I found him, as usual,
full of bustle; with a thousand petty things to do, and persons to
attend to, and in chirping good-humour; for there are few happier beings
than a busy idler; that is to say, a man who is eternally busy about
nothing.

I visited him, the morning after my arrival, in his chamber, which is in
a remote corner of the mansion, as he says he likes to be to himself,
and out of the way. He has fitted it up in his own taste, so that it is
a perfect epitome of an old bachelor's notions of convenience and
arrangement. The furniture is made up of odd pieces from all parts of
the house, chosen on account of their suiting his notions, or fitting
some corner of his apartment; and he is very eloquent in praise of an
ancient elbow-chair, from which he takes occasion to digress into a
censure on modern chairs, as having degenerated from the dignity and
comfort of high-backed antiquity.

Adjoining to his room is a small cabinet, which he calls his study. Here
are some hanging shelves, of his own construction, on which are several
old works on hawking, hunting, and farriery, and a collection or two of
poems and songs of the reign of Elizabeth, which he studies out of
compliment to the squire; together with the Novelists' Magazine, the
Sporting Magazine, the Racing Calendar, a volume or two of the Newgate
Calendar, a book of peerage, and another of heraldry.

His sporting dresses hang on pegs in a small closet; and about the walls
of his apartment are hooks to hold his fishing-tackle, whips, spurs, and
a favourite fowling-piece, curiously wrought and inlaid, which he
inherits from his grandfather. He has also a couple of old single-keyed
flutes, and a fiddle, which he has repeatedly patched and mended
himself, affirming it to be a veritable Cremona: though I have never
heard him extract a single note from it that was not enough to make
one's blood run cold.

From this little nest his fiddle will often be heard, in