We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that was advertised by a circumstantial history; we even got to illustrated magazine articles telling of the quaint past of Moggs. We concocted Moggsiana. Trusting to our partner’s preoccupation with the uncommercial aspects of life, we gave graceful history—of Moggs the First, Moggs the Second, Moggs the Third, and Moggs the Fourth. You must, unless you are very young, remember some of them and our admirable block of a Georgian shop window. My uncle brought early nineteenth-century memoirs, soaked himself in the style, and devised stories about old Moggs the First and the Duke of Wellington, George the Third and the soap dealer (“almost certainly old Moggs”). Very soon we had added to the original Moggs’ Primrose several varieties of scented and superfatted, a “special nurseries used in the household of the Duke of Kent and for the old Queen in Infancy,” a plate powder, “the Paragon,” and a knife powder. We roped in a good little second-rate black-lead firm, and carried their origins back into the mists of antiquity. It was my uncle’s own unaided idea that we should associate that commodity with the Black Prince. He became industriously curious about the past of black-lead. I remember his button-holing the president of the Pepys Society. “I say, is there any black-lead in Pepys? You know—black-lead—for grates! _Or does he pass it over as a matter of course?_” He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. “Don’t want your drum and trumpet history—no fear,” he used to say. “Don’t want to know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair. Nobody’s affair now. Chaps who did it didn’t clearly know.... What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Prince—you know the Black Prince—was he enameled or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded—very likely—like pipe-clay—but _did_ they use blacking so early?” So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs’ Soap Advertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department of literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history, but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurked among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetraps and carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his conception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his mind so early as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. “The Home, George,” he said, “wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that get in the way. Got to organise it.” For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine social reformer in relation to these matters.