which they could be made to slide neatly into position in our
standard packing-case. It sounds wild, I know, but I believe I was the
first man in the city of London to pack patent medicines through the
side of the packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than by
the lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be put
into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled to the lift
that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded up the free space
and nailed on top and side. Our girls, moreover, packed with corrugated
paper and matchbook-wood box partitions when everybody else was using
expensive young men to pack through the top of the box with straw, many
breakages and much waste and confusion.

II

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted
to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in
Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff or
credit all told--and that got by something perilously like snatching--to
the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me
(one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the
printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers,
to ask with honest confidence for L150,000. Those silent partners were
remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares and
given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle
had a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood to be
mine).

L150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade
in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the madness of the world
that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don't. At times use and wont
certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don't think I
should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development of
my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all
its delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely
proud of the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said,
"for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and
bony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it played
itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity
illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.

"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked; "only
more so. You needn't think you're anyth