ch, after all, is not to be had in all Oxford
Street. The draper's shop, carrying the principle further, would not
only dress you; post-office you; linoleum, rug and wall paper you; ink,
pencil and note paper you; but would also bury you and tombstone you, a
solemnity which it was only called upon to perform for anybody about
once in five years--Penny Green being long-lived--but was always ready
and anxious to carry out. Indeed in the back room of his shop, the
draper, Mr. Pinnock, had a coffin which he had been trying (as he said)
"to work off" for twenty-two years. It represented Mr. Pinnock's single
and disastrous essay in sharp business. Two and twenty years earlier Old
Wirk had been not only dying but "as good as dead." Mr. Pinnock on a
stock-replenishing excursion in Tidborough, had bought a coffin, at the
undertaker's, of a size to fit Old Wirk, and for the reason that, buying
it then, he could convey it back on the wagon he had hired for the day
and thus save carriage. He had brought it back, and the first person he
had set eyes on in Penny Green was no other than Old Wirk himself,
miraculously recovered and stubbornly downstairs and sunning at his
door. The shock had nearly caused Mr. Pinnock to qualify for the coffin
himself; but he had not, nor had any other inhabitant of suitable size
since demised. Longer persons than Old Wirk had died, and much shorter
and much stouter persons than Old Wirk had died. But the coffin had
remained. Up-ended and neatly fitted with shelves, it served as a store
cupboard, without a door, pending its proper use. But it was a terribly
expensive store cupboard and it stood in Mr. Pinnock's parlour as a
gloomy monument to the folly of rash and hazardous speculation.

VI

Penny Green, like Rome, had not been built in a day. The houses of the
Penny Green Garden Home, on the other hand, were being run up in as near
to a day as enthusiastic developers, feverish contractors (vying one
with another) and impatient tenants could encompass. Nor was Penny Green
built for a day. The houses and cottages of Penny Green had been built
under the influence of many and different styles of architecture; and
they had been built not only by people who intended to live in them, and
proposed to be roomy and well cup boarded and stoutly beamed and floored
in them, but who, not foreseeing restless and railwayed generations,
built them to endure for the children of their children's children and
for child