"Can you do it?" demanded the proud inventor.
"Yes," said Jeffreys desperately.
"All right," said Mr Trotter, greatly relieved. "I want a book of
twenty pages. Write anything you like, only bring the pickles in on
each page. You know the style. Twenty blood-curdling ballads, or
Aesop's fables, or something the public's bound to read. Something
racy, mind, and all ending in the pickle. It's a good thing, so you
needn't be afraid of overdoing it. You shall have a bob a page, money
down, or twenty-five bob for the lot if you let me have it this time to-
morrow. Remember, nothing meek and mild. Lay it on thick. They're the
best thing going, and got a good name. Polyglot, that's many tongues;
everybody tastes 'em."
Jeffreys, with a dismal sense of the humour of the situation, accepted
his noble task meekly, and sat down in Mr Trotter's back room with a
bottle of the pickles on the table before him.
The reader shall be spared the rubbish he wrote. To this day he flares
up angrily if you so much as mention the Polyglot Pickle to him.
The public, who laughed next week over the ridiculous bathos of those
twenty loud-sounding ballads, little guessed the misery and disgust they
had cost their author.
The one part of the whole business that was not odious was that in six
hours Jeffreys had twenty-five shillings in his pocket; and to him
twenty-five shillings meant a clear week and more in which to devote
himself to the now all-absorbing task of seeking young Forrester.
On his way back to Storr Alley that evening he called as usual at the
coffee-house, and found a further letter awaiting him:--
"Messrs. Wilkins & Wilkins will be much obliged if the writer of the
letter of the sixth inst. will favour them with a call on Wednesday
forenoon, as he may be able to assist them materially in the search in
which they are engaged. Messrs. W. & W. will treat an interview as
confidential."