“They pulled a boner in the newspaper office,” he then explained. “That line about the diamonds was lifted out of another article and put into our ad by mistake. The editor just told me so over the ’phone. I’m wondering now what the result of the mistake will be.”
We weren’t long in finding out. In the next two days we received sixty-three letters. Nor was it an easy matter for us to find out which one of these sixty-three pickle makers was the pickle genius of whom we were in search.
CHAPTER IV
A BUSY DAY
“The mistake that our proof reader made in your ad,” the newspaper editor admitted to us the following morning, “was nothing short of downright carelessness. Still,” he laughed, handing us six letters, “it doesn’t seem to have done you any harm.”
It was explained to us then just how the mistake had occurred. Right beside our ad in the newspaper “form” was an article telling about a jewelry-store robbery. A line in this article had to be reset on the linotype machine. And in making the correction the proof reader got the new “slug,” as the line of type was called, into the middle of our ad instead of in the robbery article, where it belonged.
Having been told by the editor that he would print the corrected ad free of charge, we thanked him and hurried out of the newspaper office, stopping at the first corner to see who our six letters were from.
“I saw your advertisement in to-night’s Globe,” wrote a woman on Oak Street. “I can easily identify my jar of pickles. My husband, who doubts the truth of the advertisement, says, anyhow, that it couldn’t have been our pickles in which the diamonds were found, for we never owned a diamond in all our lives except my engagement ring. Nevertheless, I would like to know for sure that mine isn’t the lucky jar.”
The next letter was from a woman by the name of Mrs. Hiram Springer.
“My attention was called this evening to your current advertising in our local newspaper. I certainly can’t say that the diamonds are mine, granting that your story of finding them is true, for I never owned but one small diamond. Were the diamonds in the cucumbers, or just in the bottom of the jar? I’m wondering if I actually pickled jeweled cucumbers! Yet how could the diamonds have gotten into the cucumbers? But tell me, please, what you know. And I’m hoping, of course, that it was in my jar that the diamonds were found.”
While it turned out that a lot of the women who wrote to us never had contributed pickles to the food sale, it isn’t to be thought of them that they tried to cheat. Take the case of Mrs. Cook on South Main Street. She hadn’t given the church people any pickles. But she had sent pickles to a number of her church-going neighbors. And so at sight of our ad her first thought was that possibly the diamonds, which could have been in the green cucumbers, though not without mystery, had turned up in one of these scattered jars. Naturally, if such was the case she intended to press her claim. Another woman having had some pickles sent to her by an eccentric country relative jumped to the excited conclusion that “rich Aunt Hattie,” as the relative was called, had put the diamonds into the pickle jar as a pleasing surprise. Some canned fruit had been stolen from her cellar, and how logical, was her quick conclusion, that a jar of “Aunt Hattie’s pickles” had thus peculiarly found its way into the hands of the church people! You can see from this why so many letters had been written to us. No one who had any possible chance of laying claim to the diamonds stood idly by. For nothing was to be lost by writing; and there was a chance of great gain.