"Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it now, my
boy. Shout it--LOUD! spread it about! Tell every one! Tono--TONO--,
TONO-BUNGAY!"

Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over which some
one had distributed large quantities of cabbage stumps and leaves. It
opened out of the upper end of Farringdon Street, and 192A was a shop
with the plate-glass front coloured chocolate, on which several of the
same bills I had read upon the hoardings had been stuck. The floor was
covered by street mud that had been brought in on dirty boots, and three
energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were
packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw and
confusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed bottles, of
a pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar in the world, the blue
paper with the coruscating figure of a genially nude giant, and the
printed directions of how under practically all circumstances to take
Tono-Bungay. Beyond the counter on one side opened a staircase down
which I seem to remember a girl descending with a further consignment
of bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition, also
chocolate, with "Temporary Laboratory" inscribed upon it in white
letters, and over a door that pierced it, "Office." Here I rapped,
inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered unanswered to find
my uncle, dressed as I have described, one hand gripping a sheath of
letters, and the other scratching his head as he dictated to one of
three toiling typewriter girls. Behind him was a further partition and
a door inscribed "ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE--NO ADMISSION," thereon. This
partition was of wood painted the universal chocolate, up to about eight
feet from the ground, and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimly
a crowded suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts, and--by
Jove!--yes!--the dear old Wimblehurst air-pump still! It gave me quite
a little thrill--that air-pump! And beside it was the electrical
machine--but something--some serious trouble--had happened to that. All
these were evidently placed on a shelf just at the level to show.

"Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had finished
something about "esteemed consideration," and whisked me through the
door into a room that quite amazingly failed to verify the promise of
that apparatus. It was papered with dingy wall-paper that had peeled in
places; it contai