unpleasantness led to a violent dispute between Grubb and the
landlord upon the moral aspects of and legal responsibility for
the consequent re-glazing. In the end Grubb and Smallways 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.