pedals, in the loose-knit chain,
in the handle-bars, above all in the brakes and tyres. Tappings and
clankings and strange rhythmic creakings awoke as the intrepid hirer
pedalled out into the country. Then perhaps the bell would jam or a
brake fail to act on a hill; or the seat-pillar would get loose, and the
saddle drop three or four inches with a disconcerting bump; or the loose
and rattling chain would jump the cogs of the chain-wheel as the machine
ran downhill, and so bring the mechanism to an abrupt and disastrous
stop without at the same time arresting the forward momentum of the
rider; or a tyre would bang, or sigh quietly, and give up the struggle
for efficiency.

When the hirer returned, a heated pedestrian, Grubb would ignore all
verbal complaints, and examine the machine gravely.

"This ain't 'ad fair usage," he used to begin.

He became a mild embodiment of the spirit of reason. "You can't expect a
bicycle to take you up in its arms and carry you," he used to say. "You
got to show intelligence. After all--it's machinery."

Sometimes the process of liquidating the consequent claims bordered on
violence. It was always a very rhetorical and often a trying affair, but
in these progressive times you have to make a noise to get a living. It
was often hard work, but nevertheless this hiring was a fairly steady
source of profit, until one day all the panes in the window and door
were broken and the stock on sale in the window greatly damaged and
disordered by two over-critical hirers with no sense of rhetorical
irrelevance. They were big, coarse stokers from Gravesend. One was
annoyed because his left pedal had come off, and the other because his
tyre had become deflated, small and indeed negligible accidents by Bun
Hill standards, due entirely to the ungentle handling of the delicate
machines entrusted to them--and they failed to see clearly how they put
themselves in the wrong by this method of argument. It is a poor way of
convincing a man that he has let you a defective machine to throw his
foot-pump about his shop, and take his stock of gongs outside in order
to return them through the window-panes. It carried no real conviction
to the minds of either Grubb or Bert; it only irritated and vexed them.
One quarrel makes many, and this 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
Sm