on the front page of the Staffordshire Signal.  Repose, reticence, respectability—­it was these attributes which he decided his shop should possess, and by means of which he succeeded.  To enter Brunt’s, with its silently swinging doors, its broad, easy staircases, its long floors covered with warm, red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth mahogany counters, its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and virgins in black, and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and discretion, was like entering a temple before the act of oblation has commenced.  You were conscious of some supreme administrative influence everywhere imposing itself.  That influence was Ezra Brunt.  And yet the man differed utterly from the thing he had created.  His was one of those dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh Midland district as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing their strange fires only in the darkness.

In 1899 Brunt’s establishment occupied four shops, Nos. 52, 56, 58, and 60, in Machin Street.  He had bought the freeholds at a price which timid people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors of Hanbridge secretly applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in anticipating the enormous rise in ground-values which has now been in rapid, steady progress there for more than a decade.  He had thrown the interiors together and rebuilt the frontages in handsome freestone.  He had also purchased several shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a new street leading from his premises to the Market Square.  Such a scheme would have met with general approval.  But there was one serious hiatus in the plans of Ezra Brunt—­to wit, No. 54, Machin Street.  No. 54, separating 52 and 56, was a chemist’s shop, shabby but sedate as to appearance, owned and occupied by George Christopher Timmis, a mild and venerable citizen, and a local preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion.  For nearly thirty years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis’s shop; more than twenty years have elapsed since he first opened negotiations for it.  Mr. Timmis was by no means eager to sell—­indeed, his attitude was distinctly a repellent one—­but a bargain would undoubtedly have been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis to the effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk’s Head that ‘th’ old leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he could get.’  The report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and from that moment Ezra Brunt’s chances of obtaining the chemist’s shop vanished completely.  His lawyer expended diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week till the incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached.  Then Ezra Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude said: 

‘Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o’ property?’

‘Not thirty thousand guineas,’ said Mr. Timmis quietly; the stern pride of the benevolent old local preacher had been aroused.