"It didn't," was the prompt contradiction. "On the contrary, after several years of struggle, it failed. The public is fickle, you know, and the novelty of owning a cheap watch wore off. Moreover, the product got a bad name and failed to be taken seriously. It required a great deal of time and energy to wind a watch with such a long spring as this one had, and I must agree that those who made jokes at the expense of the poor Waterbury were well within their rights. Furthermore, the watches had been linked up with inferior commodities and when purchasers found, for example, that they had been gulled on the suit of clothes they acquired with the watch, instead of cursing the clothier they took out their wrath on the watch company. Then, too, the firm, in order to get their wares distributed, had parted with them at so small a margin of profit that nothing was made on them. The entire scheme from beginning to end showed poor generalship. What wonder such an enterprise went down?" "And is that the end of the story?" "By no means," retorted the Scotchman. "Far from it. The management took their experience as wise people do and years later began over again, afterward reaping greater success than they had ever known, all of which proves that it never pays to give up." "Haven't lots of other kinds of cheap watches been made since?" "Yes. The Ingersoll is one. It is the result of several years' experiment with a dollar watch. At first a thick, clumsy contrivance that wound from the back like a clock was introduced, and from this stepping stone Ingersoll developed a second and third type, each an improvement on the original. Having thereby convinced himself that the dollar watch was not only possible but would sell, he got the Waterbury Company to put out his idea for him; now the Ingersolls have in addition two factories of their own, and the three together average an output of about twenty thousand watches a day. In a country as big as ours, however, the great problem is to get goods known from east to west, and from the north to the south, and this obstacle of distribution was the one the company encountered. How was the country generally to know there was a good dollar watch? Owing to the scant margin of profit on which the watches were sold, it did not pay large retailers to carry them. Neither could they find even standing-room in a shop like your fathers'." With dancing eyes the Scotchman regarded Christopher.