Albert Clegg had bought Netherby a year previously. He came from the North of England, and was deeply interested in Tyneside shipping. His father had been a small tradesman in Gateshead. Albert’s initial opportunities had not been too great, but he possessed two priceless natural assets—superb business capacity and a sincere dislike for recreation or amusement of any kind. At twenty-one he was a clerk in a rather moribund shipping business. At twenty-five he was managing clerk. In that capacity he took it upon himself, unofficially, to investigate the books of the firm—he was the sort of young man who would joyfully devote a series of fine Saturday afternoons to such an enterprise—and was ultimately able to expose a leakage of profits which had kept the venerable and esteemed cashier of the office in considerably greater comfort than his employers for the past ten years. Needless to say, Albert was the next cashier. At thirty he was junior partner and practically dictator. A few years later his exhausted seniors gave up the struggle, and allowed themselves to be bought out. Albert promptly called in his younger brother Fred, who, up to date, had been dividing his undoubted talents fairly evenly between jerry-building and revivalist preaching—a combination of occupations which enabled him to _Compound for sins he was inclined to,_ _By damning those he had no mind to—_ thus marking himself down as an ultimate and inevitable ornament of our National Legislature. Fred was taken into partnership. From that day the firm of Clegg Brothers went from strength to strength. Albert Clegg’s first wife was what Lady Christina would have described as "a young person of his own station in life." She had died a few years after the birth of Master Amos. The present Mrs. Clegg was a member of an aristocratic but impoverished family named Higgie, of Tynemouth, and she came to Albert just at a time when his rising fortunes called for a helpmeet possessed of the social accomplishments which he himself so entirely lacked. On his second marriage, he removed from Gateshead to a large house in the pleasant suburb of Jesmond, and lived there for twenty years, while the Clegg firm prospered and the Clegg family multiplied. As already foreshadowed, brother Fred’s combined reputations as a captain of industry and a silver-tongued orator presently wafted him into Parliament, where he established a reputation for verbosity and irrelevance remarkable even in that eclectic assembly.