“Well anyway,” she said at last, “we _did_ have good times with the little car while it lasted, didn’t we dear?” “Yes, love,” he replied softly, “those were the happy days.” _Lesson for Today:_ We don’t know what we’ve got until we haven’t got it any longer. HOT SKETCH NO. 14 THE WOULD-BE SALES PROMOTER ONE day a successful Manufacturer who had become strongly addicted to Efficiency Literature after making his pile, sat down and reasoned with himself thus: “Something is wrong with my business. The Sales Increase for last year was only 120 percent. It should have been 850 percent. The fault lies with my Sales Manager.” “True, he is a good slob, but he is not good enough. My Salesmen all like him and plug hard on his account, to say nothing of their own; but they don’t plug hard enough.” “What I need is a Sales Chief who is not stocked up with the dry-bones of Salesmanship—someone who comes from the outside and brings a fresh, crisp point of view—someone who knows nothing at all about the Selling Game. That’s the stunt these days! My present man is in a rut. Raus!” The morning following this sparkling synthesis, Comrade President called in the pre-damned S. M. and tied a campbell soup can to his Promising Career and sent him clattering up Main Street. Then he grabbed a note-pad, scribbled off a terse Classified Ad, pressed a button on the waistline of his desk, and told the Office Poodle to get it into the morning papers and quit spitting on the radiator. * * * * * On a high stool in the Bookkeeping Department of a certain Plumbers Supply House sat an upright and painstaking young gentleman who wrote an excellent hand, never erred in his posting, and fainted when anybody turned the ledger pages from the bottom instead of the top. But of late years he had contracted a serious case of correspondence-schoolitis and within him was stirring strong the ambition to Become An Executive And Earn Fifty Thousand A Year. He was firmly convinced that the only difference between the man shoveling coal and the man shoveling coin was a difference in Earning Power, as told graphically in the pictures; and so whenever the Boss wasn’t looking, he would pull out his book and study up on how to increase his Earning Power. On this particular morning this particular young gentleman had been casually perusing the newspaper for a few hours prior to the Boss’s arrival, and he had almost finished the twenty-eighth page when his eye leeched upon the advertisement of our friend the Efficiency President about whom we were chatting pleasantly before we went off on this spur. “I feel the fingers of Fate upon my spine,” said the young gentleman osteopathically, as he clipped the Ad from the paper and slipped it into the upper berth of his double-breasted white waistcoat.