“Advertising is a great speculation,” went on Wallingford, with a reminiscent smile. “Take Hawkins’ Bitters, for instance; nine per cent. cheap whisky flavored with coffee and licorice, and the balance pure water. Hawkins had closed a fifty-thousand-dollar advertising contract before he was quite sure whether he was going to sell patent medicine or shoe polish. The first thing he decided on was the name, and he had to do that in a hurry to get his advertising placed. Hawkins’ Bitters was familiar to ten million people before a bottle of it had been made. It was only last summer that Hawkins sold out his business for a cool two million and went to Europe.”
“His decoction is terrible stuff,” commented the doctor, more in sorrow than in anger; “but it certainly has a remarkable sale.”
“I should say it has!” agreed Wallingford. “The drug-stores sell it to temperance people by the case, and in the dry states you’ll find every back yard littered with empty Hawkins’ Bitters bottles.”
A half-dozen entertaining stories of the kind Wallingford told his guest, and by the time he was through Doctor Lazzier began himself to have large visions of enormous profits to be made in the patent medicine business. Somehow, the very waistcoat of young J. Rufus seemed, in its breadth and gorgeousness, a guarantee of enormous profits, no matter what business he discussed. But the doctor’s very last remark was upon the sacredness of medical ethics! When he was gone there was a conspicuous silence between Wallingford and his wife for a few minutes, and then she asked:
“Jim, are you actually going to start a patent medicine company?”
“Certainly I am,” he replied.
“And will Doctor Lazzier take stock in it?”
“He certainly will,” he assured her. “I figure him for from ten to twenty-five thousand.”