tisfaction with the world.

"I will stagger you to your commercial depths, my boy," Sypher continued.
"Have a drink first before I tell you."

He raised his champagne glass. "To Sypher's Cure!" They drank the toast
solemnly.

And then Sypher unfolded to his awe-stricken subordinate the scheme for
deblistering the heels of the armies of the world. Dennymede, fired by his
enthusiasm, again lifted his brimming glass.

"By God, sir, you are a conqueror, an Alexander, a Hannibal, a Napoleon!
There's a colossal fortune in it."

"And it will give me enough money," said Sypher, "to advertise Jebusa Jones
and the others off the face of the earth."

"You needn't worry about them, sir, when you've got the army contracts,"
said the traveler.

He could not follow the spirituality underlying his chief's remark. Sypher
laid down the peach he was peeling and looked pityingly at Dennymede as at
one of little faith, one born to the day of small things.

"It will be all the more my duty to do so," said he, "when the instruments
are placed in my hands. What, after all, is the healing of a few blistered
feet, compared with the scourge of leprosy, eczema, itch, psoriasis, and
what not? And, as for the money itself, what is it?"

He preached his sermon. The securing of the world's army contracts was only
a means towards the shimmering ideal. It would clear the path of obstacles
and leave the Cure free to pursue its universal way as _consolatrix
afflictorum_.

The traveler finished his peach, and accepted another which his host
hospitably selected for him.

"All the same, sir," said he, "this is the biggest thing you've struck. May
I ask how you came to strike it?"

"Like all great schemes, it had humble beginnings," said Sypher, in
comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of
his subordinate. "Newton saw an apple drop to the ground: hence the theory
of gravitation. The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings
of a little dog's mouth who had been eating shell fish. The great
Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson's family kettle. A soldier
happened to tell me that his mother had applied Sypher's Cure to his
blistered heels--and that was the origin of the scheme."

He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs and put one foot over
the other. He immediately started back with a cry of pain.

"I was forgetting my own infernal blister," said he. "About a square inch
of skin