“This place may indeed be haunted,” he thought, “perhaps by the delighted soul of Sir Walter Raleigh, patron of the weed, but seemingly not by the proprietors.”

His eyes, searching the blue and vaporous vistas of the shop, were caught by a circle of brightness that shone with a curious egg-like lustre.  It was round and white, gleaming in the sheen of a hanging light, a bright island in a surf of tobacco smoke.  He came more close, and found it was a bald head.

This head (he then saw) surmounted a small, sharp-eyed man who sat tilted back in a swivel chair, in a corner which seemed the nerve centre of the establishment.  The large pigeon-holed desk in front of him was piled high with volumes of all sorts, with tins of tobacco and newspaper clippings and letters.  An antiquated typewriter, looking something like a harpsichord, was half-buried in sheets of manuscript.  The little bald-headed man was smoking a corn-cob pipe and reading a cook-book.

“I beg your pardon,” said the caller, pleasantly; “is this the proprietor?”

Mr. Roger Mifflin, the proprietor of “Parnassus at Home,” looked up, and the visitor saw that he had keen blue eyes, a short red beard, and a convincing air of competent originality.

“It is,” said Mr. Mifflin.  “Anything I can do for you?”

“My name is Aubrey Gilbert,” said the young man.  “I am representing the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency.  I want to discuss with you the advisability of your letting us handle your advertising account, prepare snappy copy for you, and place it in large circulation mediums.  Now the war’s over, you ought to prepare some constructive campaign for bigger business.”

The bookseller’s face beamed.  He put down his cook-book, blew an expanding gust of smoke, and looked up brightly.

“My dear chap,” he said, “I don’t do any advertising.”

“Impossible!” cried the other, aghast as at some gratuitous indecency.

“Not in the sense you mean.  Such advertising as benefits me most is done for me by the snappiest copywriters in the business.”

“I suppose you refer to Whitewash and Gilt?” said Mr. Gilbert wistfully.

“Not at all.  The people who are doing my advertising are Stevenson, Browning, Conrad and Company.”

“Dear me,” said the Grey-Matter solicitor.  “I don’t know that agency at all.  Still, I doubt if their copy has more pep than ours.”

“I don’t think you get me.  I mean that my advertising is done by the books I sell.  If I sell a man a book by Stevenson or Conrad, a book that delights or terrifies him, that man and that book become my living advertisements.”

“But that word-of-mouth advertising is exploded,” said Gilbert.  “You can’t get Distribution that way.  You’ve got to keep your trademark before the public.”