What! Give up the shop Peter Constable had proudly built for his son, which Agneta Stanhope had foolishly called ‘the ancestral shop,’ with all the kindly associations to which Oliver was so susceptible, and remove into these brand-new premises, destitute of any association except that they had been raised to knock down the other, which they had done! Yet all was true that Jim argued. Time and tide were sweeping away the old traffic from the old channels. The new premises were in a better situation than Oliver’s. They had commanded ampler space and secured freer ventilation. They were more commodious and convenient. The spot on which Peter Constable built his shop had long been looked on with a covetous eye by those public-spirited citizens of Friarton who held that the town should have a new town-hall worthier of the name than that in which Oliver had delivered his lecture on Wordsworth, and Lady Cicely Hartley had been a stall-keeper in a bazaar. The town was flourishing in funds at the present moment, and the talk about the town-hall was actually passing into deed. If Oliver were to sell the piece of ground on which his shop and bakehouse stood to the new town-hall committee, his exchequer would at once be considerably replenished. There was no resemblance between the shop and bakehouse and Naboth’s vineyard. The former had seen their day and effected their purpose. Peter Constable would have been the first to pat his son on the shoulder and enjoin him, ‘Sell, my boy; sell when it is wise and right to do it. My memorial, my idea! Never mind them. Would I have had them stand in the way of your progress, which is the progress of your work? They have taken care of themselves hitherto, they will live again like everything which has real vitality in it, in a new mould, shaped to the fresh needs of a later day.’ The treaty in hand between Oliver and Jim Hull was still unsuspected in Friarton when Oliver found his back shop and his leisure a second time invaded—not by delegates from his journeymen bakers; truth to tell, they were the last to comprehend intelligently and to give in anything like a cordial adherence to their master. It was a deputation from his fellow-tradesmen that next waited upon Oliver. The party consisted of old Dadd, Polley, who had enough manhood for a deputation in which his wife’s bonnet and gown would have looked out of place, and another shopkeeper—the saddler, whose bill to Harry Stanhope Oliver had taken care should be paid in full.