[_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 Klux
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