Chapter 4 - Page 2

dates on brass plates. Here and there appeared a circular, or a typed letter, similarly designated.

Above Dr. Surtaine's desk was a triple setting, a small advertisement, a larger one, and a huge full-newspaper-page size, each embodying the same figure, that of a man half-bent over, with his hand to his back and a lamentable expression on his face.

Certain strongly typed words fairly thrust themselves out of the surrounding print: "Pain--Back--Take Care--Means Something--Your Kidneys." And then in dominant presentment--

CERTINA
CURES.

"What do you think of Old Lame-Boy?" asked Dr. Surtaine.

"From an æsthetic point of view?"

"Never mind the æsthetics of it. 'Handsome is as handsome does.'"

"What has that faded beauty done, then?"

"Carried many a thousand of our money to bank for us, Boyee. That's the ad. that made the business."

"Did you design it?"

"Every word and every line, except that I got a cheap artist to touch up the drawing a little. Then I plunged. When that copy went out, we had just fifty thousand dollars in the world, you and I. Before it had been running three months, I'd spent one hundred thousand dollars more than we owned, in the newspapers, and had to borrow money right and left to keep the manufacturing and bottling plant up to the orders. It was a year before we could see clear sailing, and by that time we were pretty near quarter of a million to the good. Talk about ads. that pull! It pulled like a mule-team and a traction engine and a fifty-cent painless dentist all in one. I'm still using that copy, in the kidney season."

"Do kidneys have seasons?"

"Kidney troubles do."

"I'd have thought such diseases wouldn't depend on the time of year."

"Maybe they don't, actually," admitted the other. "Maybe they're just crowded out of the public mind by the pressure of other sickness in season, like rheumatism in the early winter, and pneumonia in the late. But there's no doubt that the kidney season comes in with the changes of the spring. That's one of my discoveries, too. I tell you, Boyee, I've built my success on things like that. It's psychology: that's what it is. That's what you've got to learn, if you're going into the concern."

"I'm ready, Dad. It sounds interesting. More so than I'd have thought."

"Interesting! It's the very heart and core of the trade." Dr. Surtaine leaned forward, to tap with an earnest finger on his son's knee, a picture of expository enthusiasm. "Here's the theory. You see, along about March or April people begin to get slack-nerved and out-of-sortsy. They don't know what ails 'em, but they think there's something. Well, one look at that ad. sets 'em wondering if it