Decidedly it was worthy of the mighty reputations of the extinct
Wilbrahams. The Wilbrahams had gradually risen in North Staffordshire
for two centuries. About the Sunday of the Battle of Waterloo they were
at their apogee. Then for a century they had gradually fallen. And at
last they had extinguished themselves in the person of a young-old fool
who was in prison for having cheated a pawnbroker. This young-old fool
had nothing but the name of Wilbraham to his back. The wealth of the
Wilbrahams, or what remained of it after eight decades of declension,
had, during the course of a famous twenty years' law-suit between the
father of the said young-old fool and a farming cousin in California,
slowly settled like golden dust in the offices of lawyers in
Carey-street, London. And the house, grounds, lake, and furniture (save
certain portraits) were now on sale by order of the distant winner of
the law-suit. And both Mrs. Prockter and James could remember the time
when the twin-horsed equipage of the Wilbrahams used to dash about the
Five Towns like the chariot of the sun. The recollection made Mrs.
Prockter sad, but in James it produced no such feeling. To Mrs.
Prockter, Wilbraham Hall was the last of the stylish port-wine estates
that in old days dotted the heights around the Five Towns. To her it was
the symbol of the death of tone and the triumph of industrialism.
Whereas James merely saw it as so much building land upon which streets
of profitable and inexpensive semi-detached villas would one day rise at
the wand's touch of the man who had sufficient audacity for a prodigious
speculation.

"It 'ud be like living in th' covered market, living here," James
observed.

The St. Luke's Market is the largest roof in Bursley. And old