With a show of reluctance and drab boredom seldom seen outside the Banking Business, the old Nawab would finally put his influential signature to the Order, but only on condition that the manufacturers consented to run an Advertisement at their own cost in the local paper featuring his progressive and popular Establishment. Of course if they cared at the same time to slide in a few 5-point words about their own goods, why he would have no special objection. If it so happened occasionally that he so far lost his balance as to buy one dollar and sixty cents’ worth more stuff than had already been sold for him by the visiting Salesman, he would sit himself down on his comfortable chair-pad of old newspapers and write off a starchy hand-tooled letter to the House—on stationery that had been printed for him free of charge by some Easy Eugene of the manufacturing world—and insist emphatically upon having a Special Man from the factory payroll to help him dispose of the surplus as well as wait upon customers, assist in taking Inventory, and be generally useful about the premises. It is not recorded that any of the manufacturers who were privileged to sell their goods to this highly respected and pampered posh went so far as to pay his store rent for him or defray the expenses of his family wash. But through their tripe-eyed vision of Sales Promotion they ultimately succeeded in swelling his super-structure to the point where he was able to snuggle down into the comforting hallucination that he could throw any one of them into the bogs of bankruptcy at any time by simply holding back his thirty-cent orders. Now it came to pass that a certain young Lochinvar of high voltage had been tiptoeing about for a favorable Town in which to weigh-in a blooded Hardware Store, and he happened to hear of this martyr to the noble cause of service. In fact every Salesman that Young Loch met told him the same story about the old crabbino, but some of them heralded the tidings with less profanity than did others. Young Loch did not have to get a powerful field-glass to see the Opportunity that lay before him and stretched out its arms. He could see it with his eyes tied behind his back. So forthwith he sallied to the Particular Town to which we have up and alluded, and in due season he opened him up an establishment that had old Puffed Bean’s place looking like a Hongkong junk hole. The swellest cry in Hardware Shelving was installed, and you could close your big searching eyes and walk all over the place without tangling up with nail kegs, rope, barbed wire and other embellishments peculiar to the small-town hardware dispensary. When the erstwhile Dictator first got news of the coming invasion, the crust began to crack slightly around the edges of his aloofness. He commenced saying Good Morning to his Customers and introduced other revolutionary changes in the business.