," said my uncle, suddenly grave. "We aren't
talking of Tono-Bungay."

"Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort of
predestinated end; he's a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a dustbin
full of stuff; he calls it refuse--passes by on the other side. Now YOU,
sir you'd make cinders respect themselves."

My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a touch of
appreciation in his eye.

"Might make 'em into a sort of sanitary brick," he reflected over his
cigar end.

"Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: 'Why are Birds so
Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why do they digest
their food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn't man
a gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo's Asphalt Triturating, Friable
Biscuit--Which is Better.'"

He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand flourished
in the air....

"Damn clever fellow," said my uncle, after he had one. "I know a man
when I see one. He'd do. But drunk, I should say. But that only makes
some chap brighter. If he WANTS to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. That
ideer of his about the horseradish. There's something in that, George.
I'm going to think over that...."

I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end,
though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He let his
unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced a
picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my
uncle--the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn't half bad--and they
were bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend "Modern
commerce." It certainly wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it on
me one cheerful evening on the ground that it would "arouse curiosity."
In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle, excessively
and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirable
likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before an
audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, "Health, Beauty,
Strength," below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in
the studio over the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a
curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

MARION I

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay
property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing,
I see my life as it w