hat moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher
into heaven. He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having
lost her he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that
morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character. Of
rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper,
he yet had the precious instinct for soothing customers. To this day he
can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude
with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous
stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?' From
the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which
allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he
found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had
no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,'
the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street, on the opposite side,
attacks you at every railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of
'E. Brunt' is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement 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 reb