There was no use in spending thirty-five dollars, he said. He had gone to the City Water Works Office and told them to look into the matter and see if the connection they had put in at the junction of my pipe with the main in the street did not need attention. They had found that a new connection was necessary. They would see that a new one was put in at once. They were obliged to do it for nothing, he said; and then, slipping (figuratively speaking) thirty-five dollars into my pocket, he bowed gravely and was gone. B---- knew absolutely and conclusively (as any one would with a look) that I was not the sort of person who would ever have heard of that blessed little joint out in the street, or who ever would hear of it or who would know what to do with it if he did. * * * * * Sometimes I sit and think of B---- in church, or at least I used to, especially when his bill had just come in. It was always a pleasure to think of paying one of B----'s bills--even if it was sometimes a postponed one. You always knew, with B----, that he had made that bill out to you as if he had been making out a bill to himself. Not such a bad thing to think about during a sermon. I do not deny that I do lose a sentence now and then in sermons; and while, as every one knows, the sermons I have been provided with in the old stone church have been of a rare and high order, there have, I do acknowledge, been bad moments--little sudden bare spots or streaks of abstraction--and I do not deny that there have been times when I could not help feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning to the parsonage--my plumber. One could not help thinking what Dr. ---- if he once got started on a plumber like B---- (had had him around working all the week during a sermon) could do with him. I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers. I imagine he would point up their sermons a good deal--if they had his shoes on. Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual forces of our time. At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised. CHAPTER IX TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS A man's success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want. Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching the imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this present generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a class are more close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the imaginations of crowds.