OUT among the gnarled oaks of Squirrel Cove there buzzed a busy manufacturing plant.

It had been established since Time wore a bib, and, as far back as History could recall, had been handed down from Whiskers to Whiskers without a break.

The same old Superintendent with his chew of Fine Cut tucked away in a back-cavity, was always on hand each generation to bury the father and drill the son into the mysteries of Production and Distribution. Old Faithful used to love to take off his beaver cap and stroke the top of his glazed Summit while he told some eager visitor all about the industrial heirloom and his long and watchful connection with it.

In the course of centuries the Concern had of course worked up some business around the County, but at no time did there ever occur what you would call a Sensational Increase in trade. In fact, careful scrutiny revealed nothing in the whole town that could be associated with a sensation of any kind.

The annual output of the particular Hive of Industry under discussion went wholly to Old Customers who had been buying regularly since Washington hurdled the Delaware. If any attempt was ever made to get New Business it was altogether an unconscious act, and no record of the perpetrator remains.

At the time of which we are now yodeling, the current Owner and Proprietor was closing in on his sixty-fifth Milestone, and, like his father and grandfather before him, he believed in letting Well Enough alone until it crawled up and bit him in the leg. Then he would roll over on the other side.

It is only natural that such a highly strung temperament as this should be accompanied by more or less radically advanced views on Business in general. This was indeed the case, yes. And he was a horrible spendthrift when it came to Advertising. In the course of say two lunar years his total linage amounted to about as much as a Fourth Avenue delicatessen. He never counted the cost of any plant installation under one figure.

If anybody had suggested travelling the Trade, the proposition would have met with the same enthusiastic endorsement that a Shell Game would get at a Dunkard picnic.

All salesmen were looked upon as a species of unclassified bandit that victimized Firms and Customers alike, and revelled at nights with Champagne, Chickens and Chant.

Now it so happened that our Captain of Industry had a daughter. In looks she was strictly neutral, and in intelligence just sort of medio-semi. Her heart was laced to a young Scrod she had met when she was East at School learning to parry and thrust with knife and fork.

She had never seen anything like this rollicking Young Buck from one end of her shaved-neck County to the other, and so she went limp the first time he threw a ray in her direction. He was a thoroughbred at that, and could get in and out of a Taxi without furring up his Top Hat, and pay a dinner check without stopping his story and then forgetting afterward what he was talking about.

It required no profound psychoanalysis to tell from Daughter’s manner that there was only one kernel in the crib so far as she was concerned. As for the tall-collared gentry of Squirrel Cove, the entries were closed and they knew it to a man and gave her the whole runway.

Now ever since Daughter was a baby blowing bubbles out of the corners of her mouth, Papa had lived in Mortal Dread of a day when she might buckle up with a man who would be only after his Thirty Dollars which he had slowly and painfully piled up through pluck, perseverance and pre-natal pull. And so when he saw her temperature rising and her appetite falling, he dug out her secret and then started on a quiet hunt to find out whether the daring Disturber was Grade A, or tinnif.

As he had feared, the Rat proved to be a Baltimore Luncher pulling down Fifteen Dollars per week and washing his own clothes in the bath tub.

This discovery caused a Family Upheaval which for pep, polish and all-round proficiency had all Mexican Mixups looking like a harmless after-school scamper at Hop Scotch.

Every evening at sundown when Father would come home from the din and roar of his quarter-acre Plant, the neighbors would gather at their windows for the latest war news. Sometimes the Carranzaists would be on top; at other times the Villaists and Zapaists would have it.

Daughter protested hotly during these Bloody Encounters that her king was Poor but Honest, but father had him sized up as a Single Cylinder.

One night when the walls were being freshly inlaid with flying furniture and bric-a-brac, Daughter ducked out of the peaceful abode and down to the Railway Station and caught the Milk Train for New York. The following Wednesday at 4 P. M., Kendallville Time, she took Philip Darlington Wakefield for Better or Worse and wired Father for his blessing and $100 to come back home on.

At first Father was all for raising his hand to High Heaven and pronouncing the Irish Cottage Curse with all the spine-chilling heroics about darkening the Threshold, but Mother looked quietly over her goggles and told him to cut the cheap melodramatic stuff and behave like a white man, and tell the Young Folks to buy a couple of postcards of the Woolworth Building and come back home.

Under this stinging philippic Father melted into the big armchair and became human, and a couple of days later the Bride and Groom blew into Squirrel Cove and turned all Main Street into little groups of excited goatees.

Philip Darlington gave Father the first Hoyo he had ever smoked and took the old gazunk completely off his underpinning by showing a knowledge of Industry and Finance that only a Fifteen Dollar New York clerk can possess. On the strength of it he landed a job in Father’s mighty Works and wasn’t there a week before every yunk in the place was plotting for his destruction.

The reason, tersely and succinctly expressed, was that Phil proved to have Ideas and nobody around the Works cared to deliberately expose himself to the danger of infection. But Phil went right ahead and shifted men and things here, there and everywhere, and put in Time Clocks and Cost Systems and all kinds of efficiency effects.

He took the dusty correspondence off the long wire and had it filed in steel filing cabinets, and reduced the length of the Daily Conference from three cigars to one cigar. He relieved the Shipping Clerk of the Sales end of the Business, and established a separate Purchasing Department, thereby lifting this important work from the shoulders of the Night Watchman.

Phil also got out the first and only Catalogue the concern had ever had in all their 4,000 years of aggressive Trade Building, and had the whole force threatening to strike when he announced that he was going out for New Business.

After a twenty-one round Go with Father-in-Law over the revolutionary question of Advertising, Phil got in touch with a Big Agency and listened to them reel off the usual now-you-want-to-start-off-with-a-page-in-the-Saturday-Evening-Post advice, after which he proceeded to map out his own campaign as is Customary with the Laity about to advertise.

Phil also had to back Father-in-Law up against the silo and sew up both his eyes and put a pair of vacuum-cup lips on him before he could get the Old Man to see the necessity of sending a force of bright-eyed Salesmen out on the Road to sell the Stuff. Phil said there was no use manufacturing a good article and then keeping it a secret.

Every day there was something unusual doing around the Works, and of course it was all very thrilling, but when the bills began to roll in, Father-in-Law threw thirty different kinds of foaming spasm, followed by Sinking Spells that threatened to lay him ’neath the Mossy Mound. But Phil was always there with the pulmotor and the Soothing Word to pull him through.

One day when everybody around the Office was getting all ready for the Last Sad Rites on account of all this frenzied expense, business suddenly began to pour in like beer out of a busted vat. Consternation thereupon Reigned Supreme and acted like a drunken sailor.

The little Plant squeaked and groaned and heaved and puffed until it fairly burst its little panties trying to keep up with Orders. All Squirrel Cove, from the Mayor down to the Poundmaster, was given a job at something or other, and Phil was heralded all the way from Angusville to Jowett Junction as the greatest Organizing Genius the County had ever known.

When the Fiscal Year ended and Father-in-Law took a happy peep at the Balance Sheet and saw that he had holed-out more coin than all his Ancestors put together, he called Phil to his parental side and shifted the following Beautiful Tribute from his proud bosom:

“My boy,” he said, “I feel like a tan-eyed gnat for having charted you up as a parasite when I first saw you looming up on the Links. I thought you were marrying my daughter just to romp off with her father’s little Yen Bag. I would have thought the same of any man who didn’t have a few crullers of his own. I didn’t realize that there might be a chance of my getting a dumsight more out of you than you could ever get out of me. Henceforth you are a fifty percent owner of this Dugout, and what’s more, here is a little present for you in recognition of your sterling worth.”

Phil stood the cotton umbrella in a corner and soled off to break the gladsome tidings to his wife and found her tossing tennis balls with some Tea Toad in a green Sport Coat. Later Phil spied the two walking together through the Big Grove and she was listing to starboard.

“H’m,” he h’md, “I’ve got the Old Man, but it’s cost me the gal.”

He turned sadly away, mumbling something about what he thought of a Life that kept a fellow always manoeuvering for position.

Over the hills came the floating fragrance of frying fishballs, while in the tall whiffletree above him a chipmunk chipped softly to its mate.