ABOUT the time Perkins and I were booming our justly famous Codliver
Capsules,--you know them, of course, “sales, ten million boxes a
year,”--I met Kate. She was sweet and pink as the Codliver Capsules. You
recall the verse that went:--
“'Pretty Polly, do you think,
Blue is prettier, or pink?'
'Pink, sir,' Polly said, 'by far;
Thus Codliver Capsules are.'”
You see, we put them up in pink capsules.
“The pink capsules for the pale corpuscles.”
Perkins invented the phrase. It was worth forty thousand dollars to us.
Wonderful man, Perkins!
But, as I remarked, Kate was as sweet and pink as Codliver Capsules; but
she was harder to take. So hard, in fact, that I couldn't seem to take
her; and the one thing I wanted most was to take her--away from her home
and install her in one of my own. I seemed destined to come in second in
a race where there were only two starters, and in love-affairs you might
as well be distanced as second place. The fellow who had the preferred
location next pure reading-matter in Kate's heart was a poet.
In any ordinary business I will back an advertising man against a poet
every time, but this love proposition is a case of guess at results. You
can't key your ad. nor guarantee your circulation one day ahead; and,
just as likely as not, some low-grade mailorder dude will step in,
and take the contract away from a million-a-month home journal with a
three-color cover. There I was, a man associated with Perkins the Great,
with a poet of our own on our staff, cut out by a poet, and a Chicago
poet at that. You can guess how high-grade he was.
The more I worked my follow-up system of bonbons and flowers, the less
chance I seemed to have with Kate; and the reason was that she was a
poetry fiend. You know the sort of girl. First thing she does when she
meets you is to smile and say: “So glad to meet you. Who's your favorite
poet?”
She pretty nearly stumped me when she got that off on me. I don't know
a poem from a hymn-tune. I'm not a literary character. If you hand me
anything with all the lines jagged on one end and headed with capital
letters on the other end, I'll take it for as good as anything in
the verse line that Longfellow ever wrote. So when she asked me the
countersign, “Who's your favorite poet?” I gasped, and then, by a lucky
chance, I got my senses back in time to say “Biggs” before she dropped
me.
When I said Biggs, she looked dazed. I had run in a poet she had never
heard of, and she thought I was the real thing in poetry lore. I never
told her that Biggs was the young man we had at the office doing poems
about the Codliver Capsules, but I couldn't live up to my start; and,
whenever she started on the poetry topic, I side-stepped to advertising
talk. I was at home there, but you can't get in as much soulful gaze
when you are talking about how good the ads. in the “Home Weekly” are as
when you are reciting sonnets; so the poet walked away from me. 'I got
Kate to the point where, when I handed her a new magazine, she would
look through the advertising pages first; but she did not seem to
enthuse over the Codliver Capsule pages any more than over the Ivory
Soap pages, and I knew her heart was not mine.
When I began to get thin, Perkins noticed it,--he always noticed
everything,--and I laid the whole case before him. He smiled
disdainfully. He laid his hand on my arm and spoke.
“Why mourn?” he asked. “Why mope? Why fear a poet? Fight fire with fire;
fight poetry with poetry! Why knuckle down to a little amateur poet
when Perkins & Co. have a professional poet working six days a week? Use
Biggs.”
He said “Use Biggs” just as he would have said “Use Codliver Capsules.”
It was Perkins's way to go right to the heart of things without wasting
words. He talked in telegrams. He talked in caps, double leaded. I
grasped his hand, for I saw his meaning. I was saved--or at least Kate
was nailed. The expression is Perkins's.
“Kate--hate, Kate--wait, Kate--mate,” he said, glowingly. “Good rhymes.
Biggs can do the rest. We will nail Kate with poems. Biggs,” he said,
turning to our poet, “make some nails.”
Biggs was a serious-minded youth, with a large, bulgy forehead in
front, and a large bald spot at the back of his head, which seemed to be
yearning to join the forehead. He was the most conceited donkey I ever
knew, but he did good poetry. I can't say that he ever did anything as
noble as,--
“Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster
Makes all pains and aches fly faster,”
but that was written by the immortal Perkins himself. It was Biggs who
wrote the charming verse,--
“When corpuscles are thin and white,
Codliver Capsules set them right,”
and that other great hit,--
“When appetite begins to fail
And petty woes unnerve us,
When joy is fled and life is stale,
The Pink Capsules preserve us.
“When doubts and cares distress the mind
And daily duties bore us,
At fifty cents per box we find
The Pink Capsules restore us.”
You can see that an amateur poet who wrote such rot as the following to
Kate would not be in the same class whatever:--