“How is the plaster?” I asked, for there was something taking about Perkins. “Is it good for anything?” “Plaster!” he said. “Bother the plaster! The ad.'s all right, and that's the main thing. Give me a good ad., and I'll sell lead bullets for liver pills. Display 'Perkins's Bullets Kill the Disease' in all the magazines, and in a year every person with or without a liver would be as full of lead as a printer's case. Paint it on ten thousand barns, and the inhabitants of these glorious States would be plugged up like Mark Twain's frog. Now I have here an ad. that is a winner. Give me fifty thousand dollars, and we will have every man, woman, and child in America dreaming, thinking, and wearing Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster. We will have it in every magazine, on every barn, fence, and rock, in the street-cars, on highways and byways, until the refrain will ring in sixty million American heads-- “'Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster Makes all pains and aches fly faster.” “But, my dear sir,” I said, “is the plaster good?” Mr. Perkins of Portland leaned over and whispered in my ear, “There is no plaster.” “What?” I cried. “Not yet,” he said, “that will come later. We will get that later. Law of supply and demand, you know. When there is a demand, there always turns up a supply to fill it. See the point? You look bright. See this. We advertise. Get, say, fifty thousand orders at ten dollars each; total, five hundred thousand dollars. What next? We sell out. We go to some big concern. 'Here,' we say--'Here is an article advertised up to the handle. Here are orders for five hundred thousand dollars' worth. Thing on the boom. Give us two hundred thousand cash, and get up your old plaster, and fill the orders. Thanks. Good day.' See? They get a well-established business. We get a clear profit of one hundred and fifty thousand. What next? We get up another ad. Invest our whole capital. Sell out for a million. Invest again, sell out again. In ten years we can buy Manhattan Island for our town-seat and Chicago for our country-seat. The richest firm in the world--Perkins and--” “Brown,” I said, supplying the blank; “but I haven't fifty thousand dollars, nor yet ten thousand.” “What have you got?” he asked, eagerly. “Just five thousand.” “Done!” Perkins cried. And the next day we had the trade-mark registered, and had made contracts with all the Cleveland papers. “You see,” said Perkins, “we are shy of money. We can't bill the universe with a measly little five thou. We've got to begin small. Our territory is Ohio. Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster shall be known to every Buckeye, and we will sell out for twenty thousand.” So we soon had the words, “Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster Makes all pains and aches fly faster,”