dressing-jacket
in a luxurious bed, drinking China tea, and got the shape of everything
but the figures fixed by lunch time.

Young Moggs enlarged my mind considerably; he was a sort of thing
I hadn't met before; he seemed quite clean and well-informed and he
assured me to never read newspapers nor used soap in any form at all,
"Delicate skin," he said.

"No objection to our advertising you wide and free?" said my uncle.

"I draw the line at railway stations," said Moggs, "south-coast cliffs,
theatre programmes, books by me and poetry generally--scenery--oh!--and
the Mercure de France."

"We'll get along," said my uncle.

"So long as you don't annoy me," said Moggs, lighting a cigarette, "you
can make me as rich as you like."

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