ts. And, at the last it had proven to
be a commercial pill, deftly coated with the sugar of fiction. The
worst of it was that I could not offer it for sale. Advertising
departments and counting-rooms look down upon me. And it would
never do for the literary. Therefore I sat upon a bench with other
disappointed ones until my eyelids drooped.

I went to my room, and, as my custom is, read for an hour stories in
my favourite magazines. This was to get my mind back to art again.

And as I read each story, I threw the magazines sadly and
hopelessly, one by one, upon the floor. Each author, without one
exception to bring balm to my heart, wrote liltingly and sprightly
a story of some particular make of motor-car that seemed to control
the sparking plug of his genius.

And when the last one was hurled from me I took heart.

"If readers can swallow so many proprietary automobiles," I said to
myself, "they ought not to strain at one of Tate's Compound Magic
Chuchula Bronchial Lozenges."

And so if you see this story in print you will understand that
business is business, and that if Art gets very far ahead of
Commerce, she will have to get up and hustle.

I may as well add, to make a clean job of it, that you can't buy the
_chuchula_ plant in the drug stores.

VI

ART AND THE BRONCO

Out of the wilderness had come a painter. Genius, whose coronations
alone are democratic, had woven a chaplet of chaparral for the brow
of Lonny Briscoe. Art, whose divine expression flows impartially
from the fingertips of a cowboy or a dilettante emperor, had chosen
for a medium the Boy Artist of the San Saba. The outcome, seven feet
by twelve of besmeared canvas, stood, gilt-framed, in the lobby of
the Capitol.

The legislature was in session; the capital city of that great
Western state was enjoying the season of activity and profit that
the congregation of the solons bestowed. The boarding-houses were
corralling the easy dollars of the gamesome lawmakers. The greatest
state in the West, an empire in area and resources, had arisen and
repudiated the old libel or barbarism, lawbreaking, and bloodshed.
Order reigned within her borders. Life and property were as safe
there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete
East. Pillow-shams, churches, strawberry feasts and _habeas corpus_
flourished. With impunity might the tenderfoot ventilate his
"stovepipe" or his theories of culture. The arts and sciences
received