Definition of "mercantile establishment" []

• A place of business for retailing goods (noun)

WordNet. Princeton University. 2010.

• "I will go to the academy as a kind of pensioner, to be snubbed and jeered at by the wealthy cadets, and therefore my expenses will be to him inconsiderable, while I will be obtaining a good education and an honorable profession; and if I contrive to get through with credit, I will doubtless get a lieutenantcy in the army, which will pay about as well as a third-rate clerkship in some mercantile establishment and keep me cooped up in a marine fortress, or banished to the wild frontier during the whole of my natural life, like some unfortunate state prisoner or political exile. '"