allways were put to the expense of a strategic nocturnal removal to
another position.

It was a position they had long considered. It was a small, shed-like
shop with a plate-glass window and one room behind, just at the sharp
bend in the road at the bottom of Bun Hill; and here they struggled
along bravely, in spite of persistent annoyance from their former
landlord, hoping for certain eventualities the peculiar situation of the
shop seemed to promise. Here, too, they were doomed to disappointment.

The High Road from London to Brighton that ran through Bun Hill was like
the British Empire or the British Constitution--a thing that had grown
to its present importance. Unlike any other roads in Europe the British
high roads have never been subjected to any organised attempts to
grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar
picturesqueness is to be ascribed. The old Bun Hill High Street drops at
its end for perhaps eighty or a hundred feet of descent at an angle
of one in five, turns at right angles to the left, runs in a curve for
about thirty yards to a brick bridge over the dry ditch that had once
been the Otterbourne, and then bends sharply to the right again round
a dense clump of trees and goes on, a simple, straightforward, peaceful
high road. There had been one or two horse-and-van and bicycle accidents
in the place before the shop Bert and Grubb took was built, and, to be
frank, it was the probability of others that attracted them to it.

Its possibilities had come to them first with a humorous flavour.

"Here's one of the places where a chap might get a living by keeping
hens," said Grubb.

"You can't get a living by keeping hens," said Bert.

"You'd keep the hen and have it spatch-cocked," said Grubb. "The motor
chaps would pay for it."

When they really came to take the place they remembered this
conversation. Hens, however, were out of the question; there was no
place for a run unless they had it in the shop. It would have been
obviously out of place there. The shop was much more modern than their
former one, and had a plate-glass front. "Sooner or later," said Bert,
"we shall get a motor-car through this."

"That's all right," said Grubb. "Compensation. I don't mind when that
motor-car comes along. I don't mind even if it gives me a shock to the
system."

"And meanwhile," said Bert, with great artfulness, "I'm going to buy
myself a dog."

He did. He bought three in succession.