A FEUD


When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great shop in
Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt's daughter
before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew
it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in
Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon--Thursday being early-closing day. For
Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief
of the Five Towns--that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to
the manufacture of earthenware--is a place where the art of attending to
other people's business still flourishes in rustic perfection.

Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any
branch of trade, of the Five Towns. It had no rival nearer than
Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit
nothing conspicuously superior to it. The most acutely critical shoppers
of the Five Towns--women who were in the habit of going to London every
year for the January sales--spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good
shop.' And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from
two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial
magnate of equal importance with themselves. Brunt, who had served his
apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862,
when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the
district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding
itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns. He paid eighty
pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter
his gas bill was always under a sovereign. For ten years success