The houses of Penny Green carried out the Kate Greenaway effect that the
Green itself established. Along the upper road of the tilted dish were
the larger houses, and upon the lower road mostly the cottages of the
villagers; also upon the lower road the five shops of Penny Green: the
butcher's shop which was opened on Tuesdays and Fridays by a butcher who
came in from Tidborough with a spanking horse in front of him and half a
week's supply of meat behind and beneath him; the grocer's shop and the
draper's shop which, like enormous affairs in London, were also a large
number of other shops but, unlike the London affairs, dispensed them all
within the one shop and over the one counter. In the grocer's shop you
could be handed into one hand a pound of tea and into the other a pair
of boots, a convenience which, 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