When Edwin, shyly, followed Big James into the assembly room of the Dragon, it already held a fair sprinkling of men, and newcomers continued to drop in. They were soberly and respectably clothed, though a few had knotted handkerchiefs round their necks instead of collars and ties. The occasion was a jollity of the Bursley Mutual¹ Burial Club. This Club, a singular example of that dogged private co-operative enterprise which so sharply distinguishes English corporate² life from the corporate life of other European countries, had lustily survived from a period when men were far less sure of a decent burial than they were then, in the very prosperous early seventies. It had helped to maintain the barbaric fashion of ostentatiously expensive funerals, out of which undertakers and beer-sellers made vast sums; but it had also provided a basis of common endeavour and of fellowship. And its respectability was intense, and at the same time broad-minded. To be an established subscriber³ to the Burial Club was evidence of good character and of social spirit. The periodic jollities of this company of men whose professed⁴ aim was to bury each other, had a high reputation for excellence⁵. Up till a year previously⁶ they had always been held at the Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the Club, had by persistent⁷ and relentless⁸ chicane, triumphing over immense influences, changed their venue⁹ to the Dragon, whose landlady¹⁰, Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting. (It must be stated that Mrs Louisa’s name contained no

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