AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL!

When a child grows to boyhood, and a boy to manhood under the
soul-searing blight of a given name like Florian, one of two things must
follow. He will degenerate into a weakling, crushed beneath the
inevitable diminutive--Flossie; or he will build up painfully, inch by
inch, a barrier against the name's corroding action. He will boast of
his biceps, flexing them the while. He will brag about cold baths. He
will prate of chest measurements; regard golf with contempt; and speak
of the West as God's country.

Florian Sykes was five feet three and a half, and he liked to quote
those red-blooded virile poems about the big open spaces out where the
West begins. The biggest open space in his experience was Madison
Square, New York; and Eighth Avenue spelled the Far West for him. When
Florian spoke or thought of great heights it was never in terms of
nature, such as mountains, but in artificial ones, like skyscrapers. Yet
his job depended on what he called the great outdoors.

The call of the wild, by the time it had filtered into his city abode,
was only a feeble cheep. But he answered it daily from his rooms to the
store in the morning, from the store to his rooms in the evening. It
must have been fully ten blocks each way. There are twenty New York
blocks to the mile. He threw out his legs a good deal when he walked and
came down with his feet rather flat, and he stooped ever so little with
the easy slouch that came in with the one-button sack suit. It's the
walk you see used by English actors of the what-what school who come
over here to play gentlemanly juveniles.

Down at Inverness & Heath's they called him Nature's Rival, but that was
mostly jealousy, with a strong dash of resentment. Two of the men in his
department had been Maine guides, and another boasted that he knew the
Rockies as he knew the palm of his hand. But Florian, whose
trail-finding had all been done in the subway shuttle, and who thought
that butter sauce with parsley was a trout's natural element, had been
promoted above their heads half a dozen times until now he lorded it
over the fifth floor.

Not one of you, unless bedridden from birth, but has felt the influence
of the firm of Inverness & Heath. You may never have seen the great
establishment itself, rising story on story just off New York's main
shopping thoroughfare. But you have felt the call of their catalogue.
Surely at one time or another, they have suppli