" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. The
thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was
usually a quarter column in the evening papers: "HILARITY--Tono-Bungay.
Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions: "Are
you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you
bored with your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both
these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south central,
and west; and then, too, we had our first poster--the HEALTH, BEAUTY,
AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me
the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here with one or
two others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality that
initiated these familiar ornaments of London.

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known "Fog" poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)

These things were only incidental in my department.

I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business of
printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and
needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the Daily Regulator
about the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also
took up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the
drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping very
shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older
and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in
Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night sometimes until dawn.

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very
decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle's part but mine, It was
a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were
scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to
make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It's a dream,
as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify;
I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked
harder than we did. We worked far into the night--and we also worked all
day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced
to keep things right--for at first we could afford no properly
responsible