From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock bought. The _Daily Mirror_ advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’) or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’ gardener’s wife.