sly, you ought to look over the ground yourself, but as you have
asked me to give you my best judgment on the question of preference as
between Kansas and Colorado, I will say without hesitation that, if you
mean by the drug business the sale of sure-enough drugs, medicines,
paints, oils, glass, putty, toilet articles, and prescriptions carefully
compounded, I would _not_ go to Kansas at this time.

If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big
basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of
damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity.
Now is the accepted time. If it is the great, big, burning desire of
your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth
drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black walnut
prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a
Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whiskey made
of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to
go to Kansas. It is a temperance state and no saloons are allowed there.
All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success.

You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass
bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas
fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall,
red barrel in the back room filled with a mixture that will burn great
holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and
in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation
for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your
flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and
inflammatory red.

If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth
and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright
soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its
unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have
to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy
instincts and ambitions of a blind pig, I would not go into the field
where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not
necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in
order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and
populate the poor-houses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the
silent ci