Some years ago, I knew a firm who did business under the name of Foreman & Sowers.  They were a regular business vaudeville team—­one big and broad-gauged in all his ideas; the other unable to think in anything but boys’ and misses’ sizes.  Foreman believed that men got rich in dollars; Sowers in cents.  Of course, you can do it in either way, but the first needs brains and the second only hands.  It’s been my experience that the best way is to go after both the dollars and the cents.

Well, sir, these fellows launched a specialty, a mighty good thing, the Peep o’ Daisy Breakfast Food, and started in to advertise.  Sowers wanted to use inch space and sell single cases; Foreman kicked because full pages weren’t bigger and wanted to sell in car-lots, leaving the case trade to the jobbers.  Sowers only half-believed in himself, and only a quarter in the food, and only an eighth in advertising.  So he used to go home nights and lie awake with a living-picture exhibit of himself being kicked out of his store by the sheriff; and out of his house by the landlord; and, finally, off the corner where he was standing with his hat out for pennies, by the policeman.  He hadn’t a big enough imagination even to introduce into this last picture a sport dropping a dollar bill into his hat.  But Foreman had a pretty good opinion of himself, and a mighty big opinion of the food, and he believed that a clever, well-knit ad. was strong enough to draw teeth.  So he would go home and build steam-yachts and country places in his sleep.

Naturally, the next morning, Sowers would come down haggard and gloomy, and grow gloomier as he went deeper into the mail and saw how small the orders were.  But Foreman would start out as brisk and busy as a humming-bird, tap the advertising agent for a new line of credit on his way down to the office, and extract honey and hope from every letter.

Sowers begged him, day by day, to stop the useless fight and save the remains of their business.  But Foreman simply laughed.  Said there wouldn’t be any remains when he was ready to quit.  Allowed that he believed in cremation, anyway, and that the only way to fix a brand on the mind of the people was to burn it in with money.

Sowers worried along a few days more, and then one night, after he had been buried in the potter’s field, he planned a final stroke to stop Foreman, who, he believed, didn’t know just how deep in they really were.  Foreman was in a particular jolly mood the next morning, for he had spent the night bidding against Pierrepont Morgan at an auction sale of old masters; but he listened patiently while Sowers called off the figures in a sort of dirge-like singsong, and until he had wailed out his final note of despair, a bass-drum crash, which he thought would bring Foreman to a realizing sense of their loss, so to speak.

“That,” Sowers wound up, “makes a grand total of $800,000 that we have already lost.”

Foreman’s head drooped, and for a moment he was deep in thought, while Sowers stood over him, sad, but triumphant, in the feeling that he had at last brought this madman to his senses, now that his dollars were gone.