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 meet there should be some battle whilst it lasts!"

There was all of that.

While I am waiting for this big blah Ryan to give me a tumble, I spend considerable hours stalling around Ajariah Stubbs's drug store, as usual. To keep my brain limbered up for—the time when I am going to startle the business world, I'm still dressing his windows and trying to arrange his stock in a attractive way for him. When I was back of his fountain I was always thinking up new drinks and giving them fancy names to attract the trade. The bozo he's got working for him now is just a dumbell which is simply interested in the fact that at six o'clock he gets off. He'll be a soda jerk all his life.

Anyways, one day I am back in the syrup room, pottering around with the different flavors and trying my hand at making a batch of chocolate syrup, a thing at which I was very fluent once upon a time, when a idea forces its way to the top of my head. I make up my mind I will invent a new drink—some unalcoholic thirst-quencher which will sweep the nation like jazz did. I figure that right then when even its worst enemies was beginning to take Prohibition seriously, there would be millions in a drink of some kind which would present the drinker with a mild kick without making him want to climb flagpoles and sing quartette by himself. A drink which would be relished by everybody in the family from baby to grandpop. Make it tasty, Volsteady, give it a catchy name, put it in a nobby bottle and sell it for, say, ten cents the copy and then just sit back and watch the dimes roll in!