picted above the robe of the central figure,
but the artist had declared them to be unpictorial, and clung to the
majesty of the gentleman in the white beard. Around the latter's feet were
gathered a motley crew--the fine lady in her ball dress, the shoeblack, the
crowned king, the red Indian in Fenimore Cooper feathers, the half-naked
negro, the wasted, ragged mother with her babe, the jockey, the Syrian
leper, and a score of other types of humans, including in the background a
hairy-faced creature, the "dog-faced man" of Barnum's show. They were well
grouped, effective, making the direct appeal to an Anglo-Saxon populace,
which in its art must have something to catch hold of, like the tannin in
its overdrawn tea. It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the
easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had
suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature
could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of
Sypher's Cure sank deep into their souls. He remembered the glowing pride
with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress he made
in a motor-car around the London hoardings the day after the poster had
been pasted abroad. And now he knew it in his heart to be nothing but a
tawdry, commercial lie.

Framed in oak on his walls hung kindly notes relating to the Cure from
great personages or their secretaries. At the bottom of one ran the
sprawling signature of the Grand Duke who had hailed him as "_ce bon
Sypher_" at the Gare de Lyon when he started on the disastrous adventure of
the blistered heel. There was the neatly docketed set of pigeonholes
containing the proofs of all the advertisements he had issued. Lying before
him on his desk was a copy, resplendently bound in morocco for his own
gratification, of the forty-page, thin-paper pamphlet which was wrapped, a
miracle of fine folding, about each packet of the Cure. On each page the
directions for use were given in a separate language. French, Fijian,
Syrian, Basque were there--forty languages--so that all the sons of men
could read the good tidings and amuse themselves at the same time by trying
to decipher the message in alien tongues.

Wherever he looked, some mockery of vain triumph met his eye: an
enlargement of a snapshot photograph of the arrival of the first case of
the Cure on the shores of Lake Tchad; photographs of the busy factory, now
worked by a dwindling sta