I now began to realise in full measure the minor trials of the shop-keeper. The mere buying and selling, the commercial side of the business had in it a good deal of pleasure, but there was little in the more sordid details of keeping the stock dusted, the shop clean, the windows bright. Oh, those windows! they had a fascination for the children of the neighbourhood, whose chief delight appeared to be to get a lump of horse-dung or mud or filth of any sort and smear on them immediately after I had spent an hour's hard work in getting them clean. And I did begrudge the time for doing this, yet I couldn't afford to pay for having it done, that would indeed have been taking the exiguous gilt off the all too scanty gingerbread. And there was yet another prime difficulty. I dared not let a customer go who wanted anything that I had not in stock at the time, but would promise to get it whatever it was. And so I had to make continual rushes to the city after office hours, the travelling expenses almost invariably eating up double the profits, rather than have a customer go elsewhere and say that he or she could not get what they wanted from me. This is the main difficulty of a suburban shop like mine was, started with insufficient capital, for it is impossible to keep a stock on hand sufficient to meet the needs of all customers, so vastly varied are the details of nearly every business now. But in this matter the wholesale dealers are kindness and courtesy itself. They might very well neglect the small, hardly beset trader, or refuse to supply him unless he gave a substantial order, but in my experience they are just as courteous and ready to meet the wants of the smallest of their customers as they are of the huge retailers who spend scores of thousands of pounds per annum with them. I always think of this when I read diatribes in the press about the laxity of British trade methods abroad, and wonder how much truth there can be in them.