we're married, you have
settled down to honorable things; and you'll make a fortune, I know
you will."

"You bet I will," he agreed. "In the meantime I have to go out and dig
up seventy-five thousand dollars more of other people's money to put
into this concern; _which will give me another seventy-five thousand
dollars' worth of stock_! Straight business pays, Fannie!"

CHAPTER XXVI

DOCTOR QUAGG PROVES THAT STRAIGHT BUSINESS IS A
DELUSION AND A SNARE

Within a short time Wallingford had the satisfaction of seeing
bill-boards covered with his big sign ordering the public to "Laugh at
That Woozy Feeling," but not yet telling them how to do it, and he
heard people idly wondering what the answer to that advertisement was
going to be. Some of them resented having puzzles of the sort thrust
in front of their eyes, others welcomed it as a cheerful diversion.
Wallingford smiled at both sorts. He knew they would remember, and
firmly link together the mystery and the solution. Cards bearing the
same mandate stared down at every street-car rider, and newspaper
readers found it impossible to evade the same command. All this
advertising, for the appearance of which Wallingford had waited,
helped him to sell the stock to pay for itself, and, in the meantime,
he was busy putting into his new factory a bottling plant, second in
its facility if not its capacity, to none in the country. He installed
magnificent offices and for the doctor prepared an impressive private
apartment, this latter being a cross between an alchemist's laboratory
and a fortune-teller's oriental _salon_; but alas and alack! the
first day the doctor walked into his new office he had his hair
close-cropped and wore a derby, with such monstrous effect that even
Wallingford, inured as he was to most surprises, recoiled in horror!

From that moment the doctor became a hard one to manage. His first
protest was against the Benson House, the old-fashioned, moderate-rate
hotel which he had always patronized and had always recommended
wherever he went. Thereafter he changed boarding-houses and family
hotels about every two weeks; but he never had his hair cut after the
once. The big mixing vats that Wallingford installed he grew to hate.
He was used to mixing his Sciatacata in a hotel water-pitcher and
filling it into bottles with a tin funnel; and to mix up a hundred
gallons at a time of that precious compound seemed a cold, commercial
proposition which w