thought Mr. Ring, better in the States. And then something seemed to
whisper to him that here was the place to set up a branch of Ring's
Come-One Come-All Up-to-date Stores. During his stroll he had gathered
certain pieces of information. To wit, that Wrykyn was where the county
families for ten miles round did their shopping, that the population
of the town was larger than would appear at first sight to a casual
observer, and, finally, that there was a school of six hundred boys
only a mile away. Nothing could be better. Within a month he would
take to himself the entire trade of the neighbourhood.

"It's a cinch," murmured Mr. Ring with a glad smile, as he boarded his
train, "a lead-pipe cinch."

Everybody who has moved about the world at all knows Ring's Come-one
Come-all Up-to-date Stores. The main office is in New York. Broadway,
to be exact, on the left as you go down, just before you get to Park
Row, where the newspapers come from. There is another office in
Chicago. Others in St. Louis, St. Paul, and across the seas in London,
Paris, Berlin, and, in short, everywhere. The peculiar advantage about
Ring's Stores is that you can get anything you happen to want there,
from a motor to a macaroon, and rather cheaper than you could get it
anywhere else. England had up to the present been ill-supplied with
these handy paradises, the one in Piccadilly being the only extant
specimen. But now Mr. Ring in person had crossed the Atlantic on a
tour of inspection, and things were shortly to be so brisk that you
would be able to hear them whizz.

So an army of workmen invaded Wrykyn. A trio of decrepit houses in the
High Street were pulled down with a run, and from the ruins there
began to rise like a Phoenix the striking building which was to be the