The qualification of a dealer in antiques to carry out such a contract is not immediately apparent, but it is certainly more apparent than that of an auctioneer; at least, if you need to be buried, it is not to an auctioneer you will go in the first instance. To be sure, if you read _Othello_ carefully you will find that there is quite an intimate connection between "removals" and undertaking; but, as a rule, for business purposes each of the two trades is regarded as distinct from the other.
But in Mallingham you not only find them amalgamated, but both are run (decorously) in association with hardware, upholstery, blind-making, carpetbeating, life and fire assurance (not at all so extraordinary this last named), crockery, and soft goods. It is rumoured that the largest business in the "lines" referred to is in the hands of a rag and bone merchant and a dyer.
It is pleasant to be able to record that no one has yet been known to accept the suggestion of the pun in regard to the aptitude of the dyer in such a connection, and it is certain that Shakespeare himself would not have been able to resist the temptation. But Shakespeare has said many things that no one in Mallingham would care to invent or even to repeat.
One of the most notable instances of the professional enterprise of Mallingham was told to me by its victim. He was a clergyman, and the curate of one of the parishes. Now there are curates who are as fully qualified to discharge the duties of their calling as is a Rector, or even a Rural Dean: some of those whom we find in the country have "walked the hospitals," so to speak, having been for years labouring in the slums of a large town; but some are what might be termed only "first aid" men, and it was a "first aid" curate who, on taking up his duties in Mallingham, set about a zealous house-to-house visitation, being determined to become personally acquainted with every member of his flock.
He had already made some headway in the course he had mapped out for himself, and was becoming greatly liked for his sociability before he had reached the letter R in his visiting list, at the head of which was the name of Mr. Walter Ritchie, the dentist, a gentleman who, in addition to enjoying an excellent practice as a destructive rather than a constructive artist, was a good Churchman. It was between the hours of twelve and one that the zealous curate found it convenient to call upon him, and he was promptly shown into the waiting-room, where there was an elderly lady with a slightly swollen face studying the pages of a very soiled _Graphic_ of three weeks old. Of her company he was, however, bereft within the space of a few minutes, and the _Graphic_ was available for his entertainment for the next quarter of an hour. Then the maid returned and said that Mr. Ritchie would see him now, and he followed her across the passage and was shown into the usual operating room of the second-class practitioner of the country town.