The principal seat of business--electrical apparatus, heating apparatus, and decorating and plumbing on a grandiose scale--in Hanbridge, had over its immense windows the sign: "John Batchgrew & Sons." The sign might well have read: "John Batchgrew & Sons, Daughters, Daughters-in-law, Sons-in-law, Grandchildren, and Great-grandchildren." The Batchgrew partners were always tendering for, and often winning, some big contract or other for heating and lighting and embellishing a public building or a mansion or a manufactory. (They by no means confined their activities to the Five Towns, having an address in London--and another in Valparaiso.) And small private customers were ever complaining of the inaccuracy of their accounts for small jobs. People who, in the age of Queen Victoria's earlier widowhood, had sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst spout, still by force of habit sent for Batchgrew to repair a burst spout, and still had to "call at Batchgrew's" about mistakes in the bills, which mistakes, after much argument and asseveration, were occasionally put right. In spite of their prodigious expenditures, and of a certain failure on the part of the public to understand "where all the money came from," the financial soundness of the Batchgrews was never questioned. In discussing the Batchgrews no bank-manager and no lawyer had ever by an intonation or a movement of the eyelid hinted that earthquakes had occurred before in the history of the world and might occur again. And yet old Batchgrew--admittedly the cleverest of the lot, save possibly the Valparaiso soaker--could not be said to attend assiduously to business. He scarcely averaged two hours a day on the premises at Hanbridge. Indeed the staff there had a sense of the unusual, inciting to unusual energy and devotion, when word went round: "Guv'nor's in the office with Mr. John." The Councillor was always extremely busy with something other than his main enterprise. It was now reported, for example, that he was clearing vast sums out of picture-palaces in Wigan and Warrington. Also he was a religionist, being Chairman of the local Church of England Village Mission Fund. And he was a politician, powerful in municipal affairs. And he was a reformer, who believed that by abolishing beer he could abolish the poverty of the poor--and acted accordingly. And lastly he liked to enjoy himself.