'No, thank you,' said Mab, energetically spreading her wings, and, in her preoccupation, taking the wrong road and darting into the great luncheon-room, whither the Owl followed her. The tables were crowded with people, and numbers of other people who had not yet lunched, were pacing up and down, looking anxiously for vacant places which were not there. The invisible spectators recognised the British manufacturer they had seen in Richmond Park. He was seated at a table; he had been sitting there since the disappearance of his last glass of claret, half an hour by the great clock, and for the whole of that half-hour several persons, standing very near his chair, had been fixing hungry eyes upon him, and expecting him to get up. Every time his boots creaked they moved perceptibly nearer, and made swift mental calculations of the chances each would have to reach the chair; but the worthy manufacturer still sat on, stolid and complacent, with a sense of comfort the keener by contrast. Queen Mab and the Owl found him uncongenial, and flew away again. 'That is just like him,' said the Owl, when they had reached the outside of the building at last, and were perched on the roof, enjoying the fresh air. 'He _will_ get all he can for his money. In him you may see a typical and beautiful example of the Survival of the Fittest. He worked his way, by means of native moral superiority and pure chocolate composed of mortar and molasses tinted with sepia, right from the gallery into one of the very best reserved seats, and now has little books written on himself, as exemplifying the reward of virtue, and exhorts everybody to go in and do likewise. The pamphlets conclude: '"If your vocation furnishes only the trivial round and the common task; if it does not fall to your lot to invent a new pure chocolate, you can at least buy Mr. Tubbs's pure chocolate, and reverence the benefactors of humanity." 'He sends copies to all the dukes, and earls, and archbishops, and the result is an immense sale of the pure chocolate. He has never missed a chance of advertising it; he takes boxes to the meetings of the Church Missionary Society for propagation among the heathen, and so has managed to get large profits from the Zunis, and the Thlinkeets, and the Mikado, and the Shah. He nearly got into difficulty with the Low Church party once by writing privately to the Pope to solicit orders—not holy orders; orders for pure chocolate, I mean. I hope he won't carry it too far. His wife's uncle, who was a wholesale draper, seized one golden opportunity too many, and never recovered from the effects.' 'How was that?' asked Mab.