“You will therefore please take a long jump into the jungles of Oblivion, and, as a little souvenir of my regard, I propose to present each man on his way out with a swift kick in the Kupps.” When the last kanoop had cleared, Commodore Boss got a new outfit consisting of non-relatived men of EXPERIENCE and while the thought of the high salaries he had to pay them made him swallow like a cock eating corn-meal, he got over it when he found he could get off every afternoon for 18 holes and fish for a fortnight without fretting a fret. HOT SKETCH NO. 20 THE EXECUTIVE WITH THE CLERK’S MIND A ONE-LEGGED manufactory had a little round office boy. He used to go down to the Post Office every morning on his roller skates and fetch up the mail in a leather sack. We forget the exact dimensions of the sack, but the story can go on without them until such time as we may be able to call them up. This office boy was a good office boy and did not carve his initials in his father’s wooden leg, nor hang around the streets watching a safe moving in. The manufactory in which he hopped about and drew his Dollar and a Quarter a week, was not so big as Standard Oil, but it had a side-track and a time-clock and involved the activities of seventy-five men, two of which were old women—the Sales & Advertising Manager and the Proprietor. Time scuffled on, and the War came, and with it came some new business. At first the Proprietor and the Sales Manager were a little sore around the heart at this intrusion upon their days of peace and quiet, spent largely in cutting up old envelopes for scratch paper. But gradually they got used to the upset and flurry, and when the monthly Balance Sheet began to smile and then to grin, it poked their Ambition in the ribs and the first thing they knew they were actually craning their shaved necks for business in the Domestic as well as in the Export arena. Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of the puddle of commercial provincialism. Here let us state in calm, well modulated tones that we are not forgetting about the office boy, around whose life this little narrative is written, or wrotten. We are letting him alone until he grows into manhood. The office boy is now grown and so is the business. The boy is Alfred William Clerkmind, and he is the President of the whole outfit. The old proprietor has long since been mounded and marked, and the Sales & Advertising Manager, of whom we spoke of, or rather, about whom we spoke about, is still reading Printers Ink and learning how they put it over. Alfred William Clerkmind has been so busy growing up with the business that he has never had time to travel any farther from home than the one-lunged Country Club for nine holes on a Sunday morning.