III.
[A letter from Miss Candida Cumnor, one of the nurses at the Hippocrates Hospital, to Mr. Nicholas Ribstone, president of the Ginger Cubes Corporation.]
Dear Mr. Ribstone: Poor Mr. Russell is still very weak, and has not been able to write to you himself. Dr. Nichevo says that he has never seen a more interesting case of complete exhaustion of the salesmanship glands. He thinks that the patient must have been under a very severe strain for a long time preceding the breakdown. I gathered from what Mr. Russell said in his period of delirium that he had been trying to sell by mail order a complete set of Tolstoy's works, but by some mistake had bought the wrong mailing list from one of the houses that deal in such things. They gave him a list of members of the Ku KIux Klan, and the returns on his effort were so disheartening that it broke him all up. He was very queer for a while. But one delusion helped a great deal. He had a fixed idea that the temperature chart at the end of his bed was a sales graph, and the more peaks there were in it the better he was pleased, for he thought that at last the K. K. K. were beginning to fall for Tolstoy.
At any rate, he is much better now, and asks me to write to you for him. I must say that I think you picked a fine Advertising Manager for your Ginger Cubes: I have never seen such an enthusiastic fellow. The specimen drawings for car cards that you sent him are pinned up on a screen beside the bed, and he hardly takes his eyes off them. He has had all the nurses in the ward munching the Ginger Cubes, or Digestive Dice as he likes to call them, and is asking me to make a note of their opinions. He says he plans an interesting lay-out under the caption
COMMENTS OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION ON THE GINGER CUBES
I must admit that I find the Cubes very tasty and refreshing.
To show you that he is really picking up, I will tell you that this morning he asked me to send out to the nearest newsstand for a number of magazines and papers, which he has been looking through with close attention. He brightened up very much when he found a copy of a new magazine called "The International Interpreter." He says for you to be sure to get hold of it, as it is edited by a very clever man called Frederick Dixon and contains a poem about Ginger. He asked me to copy down one stanza, as it might be useful for "copy"—
A merest little box of tin,
But sharp of tongue are the spirits that wait,
Bewrapped in their sugary garments within,
Spirits of ginger, dryly sedate.
He says he thinks it is a good omen that in its very first issue this magazine should have a poem about Ginger.
But I must not deceive you. In spite of his enthusiasm he is still very weak, and it will take a lot of building up before his merchandising centers are up to par. It would do no harm if you were to send him some stimulating books to read, such as Orison Swett Marden or Dr. Crane.
By the way, Mr. Ribstone, some one in your office has made a mistake in addressing letters to this hospital, the name of which is not Hypocrites but Hippocrates; the spelling is nearly the same but the pronunciation is different, after the name of a famous doctor of old times. Now I must draw to an end, for the patient needs attention; this is a long letter but he wanted you to know all about him.
Yours sincerely,