He had not been successful in securing steady employment, and subsequent illness had brought him down to bed-rock.
How he was going to get on, he hadn’t a very clear idea.
“If I only had a few dollars,” he said sadly as he gazed through the car window at the bleak, wintry prospect, “I feel sure I could get on my feet.”
“Then you’re broke, are you?” asked Dick, sympathetically.
“Flat,” admitted the young Englishman, in a dejected voice.
“That’s tough.”
“Yes, it is. It is strange how hard luck follows a fellow. I’ll show you something I invented just before I was taken down with the gastric fever. It’s a good idea, and since I got out of the hospital I’ve been trying to sell a half-interest for a hundred dollars so I can get it patented. But nobody seems to see any money in it.”
The young stranger put his hand in his pocket and drew out a well-worn pocket-book.
From this he produced a descriptive drawing of a new idea in water-coolers.
“This is entirely different from anything on the market,” he said, “and if manufactured and properly pushed, I don’t see why it shouldn’t sell well. You see, the water is kept entirely separate from the ice, which is chopped up, mixed with rock salt on the same principle as that used and packed around an ice-cream can. The ice preparation is put in here, the space indicated by I, the water in here, which is simply a galvanized receptacle which can be removed when the cooler is to be cleaned out and recharged. The advantages of this scheme are that you can use filtered water or any special kind of spring water—in fact any kind of fluid—and keep it cold without direct contact with or contamination from the ice itself.”