“O, splendid!” said Washington.  “Let’s commence right away—­let’s——­”

“——­1,000,000 bottles in the United States—­profit at least $350,000 —­and then it would begin to be time to turn our attention toward the real idea of the business.”

“The real idea of it!  Ain’t $350,000 a year a pretty real——­”

“Stuff!  Why what an infant you are, Washington—­what a guileless, short-sighted, easily-contented innocent you, are, my poor little country-bred know-nothing!  Would I go to all that trouble and bother for the poor crumbs a body might pick up in this country?  Now do I look like a man who——­does my history suggest that I am a man who deals in trifles, contents himself with the narrow horizon that hems in the common herd, sees no further than the end of his nose?  Now you know that that is not me—­couldn’t be me.  You ought to know that if I throw my time and abilities into a patent medicine, it’s a patent medicine whose field of operations is the solid earth! its clients the swarming nations that inhabit it!  Why what is the republic of America for an eye-water country?  Lord bless you, it is nothing but a barren highway that you’ve got to cross to get to the true eye-water market!  Why, Washington, in the Oriental countries people swarm like the sands of the desert; every square mile of ground upholds its thousands upon thousands of struggling human creatures—­and every separate and individual devil of them’s got the ophthalmia!  It’s as natural to them as noses are—­and sin.  It’s born with them, it stays with them, it’s all that some of them have left when they die.  Three years of introductory trade in the orient and what will be the result?  Why, our headquarters would be in Constantinople and our hindquarters in Further India!  Factories and warehouses in Cairo, Ispahan, Bagdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Yedo, Peking, Bangkok, Delhi, Bombay—­and Calcutta!  Annual income—­well, God only knows how many millions and millions apiece!”

Washington was so dazed, so bewildered—­his heart and his eyes had wandered so far away among the strange lands beyond the seas, and such avalanches of coin and currency had fluttered and jingled confusedly down before him, that he was now as one who has been whirling round and round for a time, and, stopping all at once, finds his surroundings still whirling and all objects a dancing chaos.  However, little by little the Sellers family cooled down and crystalized into shape, and the poor room lost its glitter and resumed its poverty.  Then the youth found his voice and begged Sellers to drop everything and hurry up the eye-water; and he got his eighteen dollars and tried to force it upon the Colonel—­pleaded with him to take it—­implored him to do it.  But the Colonel would not; said he would not need the capital (in his native magnificent way he called that eighteen dollars Capital) till the eye-water was an accomplished fact.  He made Washington easy in his mind, though, by promising that he would call for it just as soon as the invention was finished, and he added the glad tidings that nobody but just they two should be admitted to a share in the speculation.