‘Which?’ said Mr Brindley.

That one.’

‘Yes, I fancy it is,’ he negligently agreed.  ‘Yes, it is.’

‘It’s not signed,’ I remarked.

‘It ought to be,’ said Mr Brindley; then laughed, ‘Too late now!’

‘How did it get here?’

’Don’t know.  Oh!  I think Mr Perkins won it in a raffle at a bazaar, and then hung it here.  He did as he liked here, you know.’

I was just going to become vocal in its praise, when Mr Brindley said—­

’That thing under it is a photograph of a drinking-cup for which one of our pupils won a national scholarship last year!’

Mr Aked appeared in the distance.

‘I fancy the old boy wants to be off to bed,’ Mr Brindley whispered kindly.

So we left the Wedgwood Institution.  I began to talk to Mr Brindley about music.  The barbaric attitude of the Five Towns towards great music was the theme of some very lively animadversions on his part.

VI

The Tiger was very conveniently close to the Wedgwood Institution.  The Tiger had a ‘yard’, one of those long, shapeless expanses of the planet, partly paved with uneven cobbles and partly unsophisticated planet, without which no provincial hotel can call itself respectable.  We came into it from the hinterland through a wooden doorway in a brick wall.  Far off I could see one light burning.  We were in the centre of Bursley, the gold angel of its Town Hall rose handsomely over the roof of the hotel in the diffused moonlight, but we might have been in the purlieus of some dubious establishment on the confines of a great seaport, where anything may happen.  The yard was so deserted, so mysterious, so shut in, so silent, that, really, infamous characters ought to have rushed out at us from the obscurity of shadows, and felled us to the earth with no other attendant phenomenon than a low groan.  There are places where one seems to feel how thin and brittle is the crust of law and order.  Why one should be conscious of this in the precincts of such a house as the Tiger, which I was given to understand is as respectable as the parish church, I do not know.  But I have experienced a similar feeling in the yards of other provincial hotels that were also as correct as parish churches.  We passed a dim fly, with its shafts slanting forlornly to the ground, and a wheelbarrow.  Both looked as though they had been abandoned for ever.  Then we came to the lamp, which illuminated a door, and on the door was a notice:  ‘Private Bar.  Billiards.’

I am not a frequenter of convivial haunts.  I should not dare to penetrate alone into a private bar; when I do enter a private bar it is invariably under the august protection of an habitue, and it is invariably with the idea that at last I am going to see life.  Often has this illusion been shattered, but each time it perfectly renewed itself.  So I followed the bold Mr Brindley into the private bar of the Tiger.