Small bottles
fifty cents, large ones a dollar. Average cost, five and seven cents for
the two sizes.

"The first year sell, say, ten thousand bottles in Missouri, seven
thousand in Iowa, three thousand in Arkansas, four thousand in Kentucky,
six thousand in Illinois, and say twenty-five thousand in the rest of the
country. Total, fifty five thousand bottles; profit clear of all
expenses, twenty thousand dollars at the very lowest calculation. All
the capital needed is to manufacture the first two thousand bottles
--say a hundred and fifty dollars--then the money would begin to flow in.
The second year, sales would reach 200,000 bottles--clear profit, say,
$75,000--and in the meantime the great factory would be building in St.
Louis, to cost, say, $100,000. The third year we could, easily sell
1,000,000 bottles in the United States and----"

"O, splendid!" said Washington. "Let's commence right away--let's----"

"----1,000,000 bottles in the United States--profit at least $350,000
--and then it would begin to be time to turn our attention toward the real
idea of the business."

"The real idea of it! Ain't $350,000 a year a pretty real----"

"Stuff! Why what an infant you are, Washington--what a guileless,
short-sighted, easily-contented innocent you, are, my poor little
country-bred know-nothing! Would I go to all that trouble and bother for
the poor crumbs a body might pick up in this country? Now do I look like
a man who----does my history suggest that I am a man who deals in
trifles, contents himself with the narrow horizon that hems in the common
herd, sees no further than the end of his nose? Now you know that that
is not me--couldn't be me. You ought to know that if I throw my time and
abilities into a patent medicine, it's a patent medicine whose field of
operations is the solid earth! its clients the swarming nations that
inhabit it! Why what is the republic of America for an eye-water
country? Lord bless you, it is nothing but a barren highway that you've
got to cross to get to the true eye-water market! Why, Washington, in
the Oriental countries people swarm like the sands of the desert; every
square mile of ground upholds its thousands upon thousands of struggling
human creatures--and every separate and individual devil of them's got
the ophthalmia! It's as natural to them as noses are--and sin. It's
born with them, it stays with them, it's all that some of them have left
when they die.