that sells itself," he said; "the kind of
thing that pays its own small way as it goes along, until it has profits
enough to begin advertising it right. Everybody has to use glue, and if
I make mine convenient and cheap, everybody'll buy mine. But it's got
to be glue that'll STICK; it's got to be the best; and if we find how
to make it we've got to keep it a big secret, of course, or anybody can
steal it from us. There was a man here last month; he knew a formula
he wanted to sell me, 'sight unseen'; but he was in such a hurry I got
suspicious, and I found he'd managed to steal it, working for the big
packers in their glue-works. We've got to find a better glue than that,
anyhow. I'm going to set you and Campbell at it. You're a practical,
wide-awake young feller, and Campbell's a mighty good chemist; I guess
you two boys ought to make something happen."

His guess was shrewd enough. Working in a shed a little way outside the
town, where their cheery employer visited them sometimes to study their
malodorous stews, the two young men found what Lamb had set them to
find. But Campbell was thoughtful over the discovery. "Look here," he
said. "Why ain't this just about yours and mine? After all, it may be
Lamb's money that's paid for the stuff we've used, but it hasn't cost
much."

"But he pays US," Adams remonstrated, horrified by his companion's idea.
"He paid us to do it. It belongs absolutely to him."

"Oh, I know he THINKS it does," Campbell admitted, plaintively. "I
suppose we've got to let him take it. It's not patentable, and he'll
have to do pretty well by us when he starts his factory, because he's
got to depend on us to run the making of the stuff so that the workmen
can't get onto the process. You better ask him the same salary I do, and
mine's going to be high."

But the high salary, thus pleasantly imagined, was never paid. Campbell
died of typhoid fever, that summer, leaving Adams and his employer the
only possessors of the formula, an unwritten one; and Adams, pleased to
think himself more important to the great man than ever, told his wife
that there could be little doubt of his being put in sole charge of
the prospective glue-works. Unfortunately, the enterprise remained
prospective.

Its projector had already become "inveigled into another side-line,"
as he told Adams. One of his sons had persuaded him to take up a
"cough-lozenge," to be called the "Jalamb Balm Trochee"; and the lozenge
did well enou