he skilled pharmaceutist
responsible for the preparation of the ointment to the grimy boy who did
odd jobs about the sheds had been pre-conceived by him, had had its
mainspring in his brain. Apart from idealistic aspirations concerned with
the Cure itself, the perfecting of this machinery of human activity had
been a matter of absorbing interest, its perfection a subject of honorable
pride.

He walked through the works day after day, noting the familiar sights and
sounds, pausing here and there lovingly, as a man does in his garden to
touch some cherished plant or to fill himself with the beauty of some rare
flower. The place was inexpressibly dear to him. That those furnaces should
ever grow cold, that those vats should ever be empty, that those two magic
words should cease to blaze on the wooden boxes, should fade from the sight
of man, that those gates should ever be shut, seemed to transcend
imagination. The factory had taken its rank with eternal, unchanging
things, like the solar system and the Bank of England. Yet he knew only too
well that there had been change in the unchanging and in his soul dwelt a
sickening certainty that the eternal would be the transient. Gradually the
staff had been reduced, the output lessened. Already two of the long tables
once filled with girls stood forlornly empty.

His comfortably appointed office in Moorgate Street told the same story.
Week after week the orders slackened and gradually the number of the clerks
had shrunk. Gloom settled permanently on the manager's brow. He almost
walked on tiptoe into Sypher's room and spoke to him in a hushed whisper,
until rebuked for dismalness.

"If you look like that, Shuttleworth, I shall cry."

On another occasion Shuttleworth said:

"We are throwing money away on advertisements. The concern can't stand
it."

Sypher turned, blue pencil in hand, from the wall where draft proofs of
advertisements were pinned for his correction and master's touch. This was
a part of the business that he loved. It appealed to the flamboyant in his
nature. It particularly pleased him to see omnibuses pass by bearing the
famous "Sypher's Cure," an enlargement of his own handwriting, in streaming
letters of blood.

"We're going to double them," said he; and his air was that of the racing
Mississippi captains of old days who in response to the expostulation of
their engineers sent a little nigger boy to sit on the safety-valve.

The dismal manager turned