One fine day an Old Customer to whom Bill had once sold goods when he himself was a livery-bumping County Hopper, blew into the Office as the Representative of an Advertising Novelty House. It seems that Business had gone bunc with the Old Customer and he had been obliged to knit up with a Road Job to keep the wolf off the door-mat. He was sure he could land his old friend Bill as a new customer for his almanacs or some other neat and fetching advertising novelty, and thus make a Killing with his Firm. He sent word back to the barracks where Bill was entrenched saying that he was waiting in the offing and wanted to see him. Bill frowned when he saw the card but told the sentry to show him in anyway. A few moments later the poor misguided Yob, who had read his Human Nature all awry, appeared at the door of the Cold Storage Plant, and, catching sight of Bill who sat stalling as usual and didn’t see the Approach, rushed into the room with an extended bronze paw the size of a Smithfield ham and yelled: “Hello Bill old socks!” The shock was too much. To have been “Billed” by this brazen intruder would have been bad enough, but to be “Socked” at the same time was the belt-below-the-belt that laid Bill low. With one hand clapped to his heart and the other to his head, he staggered to his feet and then fell heavily to the ice-bound floor—a victim of heart failure superinduced by acute inflammation of the Ego. _Lesson for Today:_ To get a calm view of the bull, you’ve got to be on the opposite side of the fence. HOT SKETCH NO. 7 THE PAMPERED DEALER A CERTAIN condescending old zambuck thought he was doing his Town a large comprehensive favor by being in the hardware business. Whenever a Customer entered his store, carrying the door-webs through on his hat, the grouchy one would look over his glasses to see who it was, and then go on reading his newspaper until he got good and ready, thereby justly rebuking the intruder. Salesmen who called to sell him their flawless Goods used to grow old and hoary sitting around the dumpo waiting for him to say officially that he didn’t care to look at the stuff. Then they would salaam low and in a galley-grind’s voice thank him for the interview, and back out of the place on their shirt-fronts, and go sell a lot of Small Bills at high prices over the County at the expense of Dear House, and then come back and beg the Civic Benefactor to accept the bouquet at 50 percent profit to himself by placing an order covering only the bare quantity they had sold for him.