Those benefactors of humanity, the leading advertisers, used 'A Question of Cubits' for their own exalted ends. A firm of manufacturers of high-heeled shoes played with it for a month in various forms. The proprietors of an unrivalled cheap cigarette disbursed thousands of pounds in order to familiarize the public with certain facts. As thus: 'A Question of Cubits. Every hour of every day we sell as many cigarettes as, if placed on end one on the top of the other, would make a column as lofty as the Eiffel Tower. Owing to the fact that cigarettes are not once mentioned in _A Question of Cubits_, we regret to say that the author has not authorized us to assert that he was thinking of our cigarettes when he wrote Chapter VII. of that popular novel.' Editors and publishers cried in vain for Henry. They could get from him neither interviews, short stories, nor novels. They could only get polite references to Mark Snyder. And Mark Snyder had made his unalterable plans for the exploitation of this most wonderful racehorse that he had ever trained for the Fame Stakes. The supply of chatty paragraphs concerning the hero and the book of the day would have utterly failed had not Mr. Onions Winter courageously come to the rescue and allowed himself to be interviewed. And even then respectable journals were reduced to this sort of paragraph: 'Apropos of Mr. Knight's phenomenal book, it may not be generally known what the exact measure of a cubit is. There have been three different cubits--the Scriptural, the Roman, and the English. Of these, the first-named,' etc. So the thing ran on. And at the back of it all, supporting it all, was the steady and prodigious sale of the book, the genuine enthusiasm for it of the average sensible, healthy-minded woman and man. Finally, the information leaked out that Macalistairs had made august and successful overtures for the reception of Henry into their fold. Sir Hugh Macalistair, the head of the firm, was (at that time) the only publisher who had ever been knighted. And the history of Macalistairs was the history of all that was greatest and purest in English literature during the nineteenth century. Without Macalistairs, English literature since Scott would have been nowhere. Henry was to write a long novel in due course, and Macalistairs were to have the world's rights of the book, and were to use it as a serial in their venerable and lusty _Magazine_, and to pay Henry, on delivery of the manuscript, eight thousand pounds, of which six thousand was to count as in advance of royalties on the book. Mr. Onions Winter was very angry at what he termed an ungrateful desertion. The unfortunate man died a year or two later of appendicitis, and his last words were that he, and he alone, had 'discovered' Henry. CHAPTER XXI PLAYING THE NEW GAME