Presently I began to feel that this quest of a shop was destined to bring me prematurely to my grave. East, west, north, and south I sought, and now I felt no nearer than at the outset to the object of my search. At last I found what apparently was exactly the thing, a double-fronted shop with a sufficient number of living rooms above, in a business thoroughfare within easy reach of town, and at the fairly reasonable rent of £40 a year. I knew no one who could tell me anything about the character of the neighbourhood, so I had to form my own conclusions as to the prospects of business there. And in any case I was so weary of searching for the apparently unattainable that I was willing to be deceived had anybody tried to persuade me. But that I think was the determining factor. Nobody did try to influence me. The man who owned the shop and carried on the business of a grocer next door did not seem at all anxious to have me for a tenant, in fact he was most reticent and retiring when approached, which may have been genius on his part, although I never saw cause to suspect him of anything of the kind. At anyrate I persuaded myself that I should never find any better shop than this for my purpose and I closed the bargain by paying handsel, and fixing the date for coming in. Then I had to turn my attention to the fitting up of this shop, for it was absolutely bare, just three match-boarded walls which by the way were covered with some messy alleged varnish which never dried, and the double front as aforesaid. I procured several price-lists from firms whose speciality was the fitting up of shops, and after a prolonged study of them came to the conclusion that to fit up this shop in even the most economical way, according to their specifications, would absorb our entire capital and necessitate our procuring stock entirely on credit. Which was absurd; for we had no credit, at least in my innocence of business I knew of none. Later, I learned to my sorrow that the obtaining of credit was easy in almost an exactly inverse ratio to the difficulty of meeting the bills when they came in.