When old Jack Carter (reputed to be the best turner that Bursley ever produced) started a little potbank near St. Peter’s Church in 1861—­he was then forty, and had saved two hundred pounds—­he little dreamt that the supreme and final result after forty years would be the dog.  But so it was.  Old Jack Carter had a son John Carter, who married at twenty-five and lived at first on twenty-five shillings a week, and enthusiastically continued the erection of the fortune which old Jack had begun.  At thirty-three, after old Jack’s death, John became a Town Councillor.  At thirty-six he became Mayor and the father of Ellis, and the recipient of a silver cradle.  Ellis was his wife’s maiden name.  At forty-two he built the finest earthenware manufactory in Bursley, down by the canal-side at Shawport.  At fifty-two he had been everything that a man can be in the Five Towns—­from County Councillor to President of the Society for the Prosecution of Felons.  Then Ellis left school and came to the works to carry on the tradition, and his father suddenly discovered him.  The truth was that John Carter had been so laudably busy with the affairs of his town and county that he had nearly forgotten his family.  Ellis, in the process of achieving doghood, soon taught his father a thing or two.  And John learnt.  John could manage a public meeting, but he could not manage Ellis.  Besides, there was plenty of money; and Ellis was so ingratiating, and had curly hair that somehow won sympathy.  And, after all, Ellis was not such a duffer as all that at the works.  John knew other people’s sons who were worse.  And Ellis could keep order in the paintresses’ ‘shops’ as order had never been kept there before.

John sometimes wondered what old Jack would have said about Ellis and his friends, those handsome dogs, those fine dandies, who taught to the Five Towns the virtue of grace and of style and of dash, who went up to London—­some of them even went to Paris—­and brought back civilization to the Five Towns, who removed from the Five Towns the reproach of being uncouth and behind the times.  Was the outcome of two generations of unremitting toil merely Ellis? (Ellis had several pretty sisters, but they did not count.) John could only guess at what old Jack’s attitude might have been towards Ellis—­Ellis, who had his shirts made to measure.  He knew exactly what was Ellis’s attitude towards the ideals of old Jack, old Jack the class-leader, who wore clogs till he was thirty, and dined in his shirt-sleeves at one o’clock to the end of his life.

Ellis quitted the portico, ran down the winding garden-path, and jumped neatly and fearlessly on to an electric tramcar as it passed at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.  The car was going to Hanbridge, and it was crowded with the joy of life; Ellis had to stand on the step.  This was the Saturday before the first Monday in August, and therefore the formal opening of Knype Wakes, the most carnivalesque of all the carnivals