Twenty minutes later old Butch and I had the house to ourselves. But now I was ordered to clear out of the kitchen by the secretive pickler, who had no intention of letting me see how he mixed up the liquid dope that gave the pickles their swell taste. That, he said, was the secret part of the work.
The following morning I got a telegram from Poppy. His father, he wired, having eaten too much wedding cake was sick in bed. “Go ahead and distribute the samples,” the telegram instructed. “I’ll surely be home to-morrow or Sunday.”
Some of the pickles were in pint and quart jars. But the most of them were in a barrel that we had gotten at a grocery store. They sure were swell-looking pickles, all right. But—oof!—I couldn’t bring myself to eat any of them. Even to handle them in packing the sample bottles almost gagged me.
One thousand and two hundred pickles having been put away quartet style in the three hundred bottles, I did the corking and label sticking, after which I borrowed a neighbor’s pushcart and set out, leaving a sample bottle and a handbill at every house in our end of town. I think you’ll agree with me that Poppy’s printed handbill was pretty slick. Here it is:
AUNT JEMIMA’S PICKLES
Every housewife knows how good Aunt Jemima’s pancakes are. And now we have cucumber pickles of the same wonderful quality—Aunt Jemima’s pickles—home-made, with a taste you’ll never forget.
Here at last are the perfect pickles you long have dreamed of, the kind of pickles that you never could quite make in your own kitchen. And the secret, of course, is in the secret recipe!
We know that when you have sampled these marvelous pickles you will want more. And the only place where you can buy them—in the bulk at 20¢ a dozen, and in sealed-tight glass jars at 35¢ a pint and 65¢ a quart—is at
POPPY’S PICKLE PARLOR
“The Green and Yellow Store”
224 South Main Street