think of the days when these bits and bobs were new treasures. But
he did not.
And at his side Miss Pinnegar quietly took orders for shirts,
discussed and agreed, made measurements and received instalments.
The shop was now only opened on Friday afternoons and evenings, so
every day, twice a day, James was seen dithering bare-headed and
hastily down the street, as if pressed by fate, to the Conservative
Club, and twice a day he was seen as hastily returning, to his
meals. He was becoming an old man: his daughter was a young woman:
but in his own mind he was just the same, and his daughter was a
little child, his wife a young invalid whom he must charm by some
few delicate attentions--such as the peeled apple.
At the club he got into more mischief. He met men who wanted to
extend a brickfield down by the railway. The brickfield was called
Klondyke. James had now a new direction to run in: down hill towards
Bagthorpe, to Klondyke. Big penny-daisies grew in tufts on the brink
of the yellow clay at Klondyke, yellow eggs-and-bacon spread their
midsummer mats of flower. James came home with clay smeared all over
him, discoursing brilliantly on grit and paste and presses and kilns
and stamps. He carried home a rough and pinkish brick, and gloated
over it. It was a _hard_ brick, it was a non-porous brick. It was an
ugly brick, painfully heavy and parched-looking.
This time he was sure: Dame Fortune would rise like Persephone out
of the earth. He was all the more sure, because other men of the
town were in with him at this venture: sound, moneyed grocers and
plumbers. They were all going to become rich.
Klondyke lasted a year and a half, and was not so bad, for in the
end, all things considered, James had lost not more than five per
cent. of his money. In fact, all things considered, he was about
square. And yet he felt Klondyke as the greatest blow of all. Miss
Pinnegar would have aided and abetted him in another scheme, if it
would but have cheered him. Even Miss Frost was nice with him. But
to no purpose. In the year after Klondyke he became an old man, he
seemed to have lost all his feathers, he acquired a plucked,
tottering look.
Yet he roused up, after a coal-strike. Throttle-Ha'penny put new
life into him. During a coal-strike the miners themselves began
digging in the fields, just near the houses, for the surface coal.
They found a plentiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the
Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of
a bank, and approached by a footrill, a sloping shaft down which the
men walked. When the strike was over, two or three miners still
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