served excellently.
People were soon asking each other whether they had heard that Denry
Machin's "latest" was to buy a mule. He obtained a little old victoria
for another ten pounds, and a good set of harness for three guineas. The
carriage was low, which enabled him, as he said, to nip in and out much
more easily than in and out of a trap. In his business you did almost
nothing but nip in and out. On the front seat he caused to be fitted a
narrow box of japanned tin, with a formidable lock and slits on the top.
This box was understood to receive the rents, as he collected them. It
was always guarded on journeys by a cross between a mastiff and
something unknown, whose growl would have terrorised a lion-tamer. Denry
himself was afraid of Rajah, the dog, but he would not admit it. Rajah
slept in the stable behind Mrs Machin's cottage, for which Denry paid a
shilling a week. In the stable there was precisely room for Rajah, the
mule and the carriage, and when Denry entered to groom or to harness,
something had to go out.

The equipage quickly grew into a familiar sight in the streets of the
district. Denry said that it was funny without being vulgar. Certainly
it amounted to a continual advertisement for him; an infinitely more
effective advertisement than, for instance, a sandwichman at
eighteen-pence a day, and costing no more, even with the licence and the
shoeing. Moreover, a sandwichman has this inferiority to a turnout: when
you have done with him you cannot put him up to auction and sell him.
Further, there are no sandwichmen in the Five Towns; in that democratic
and independent neighbourhood nobody would deign to be a sandwichman.

The mulish vehicular display does not end the tale of Denry's splendour.
He had an office in St Luke's Square, and in the office was an
office-boy, small but genuine, and a real copying-press, and outside it
was the little square signboard which in the days of his simplicity used
to be screwed on to his mother's door. His mother's steely firmness of
character had driven him into the extravagance of an office. Even after
he had made over a thousand pounds out of the Llandudno lifeboat in less
than three months, she would not listen to a proposal for going into a
slightly larger house, of which one room might serve as an office. Nor
would she abandon her own labours as a sempstress. She said that since
her marriage she had always lived in that cottage and had always worked,
and that she