“A business is a business,” says he, “from the time it’s organized. And we’ve been organized for more than an hour.”

“But we haven’t any store. And you say yourself that you don’t know where we’re going to get our pickles.”

“I know where we’re going to get the first quart,” he grinned.

I saw then that he was holding something back. Which was like him, of course! And so I was prepared for something of a surprise as I followed him down the street to his home, where he reappeared from the cellar with a jar of cucumber pickles, which, on sampling, I had to acknowledge were the swellest home-made cucumber pickles that I ever had set my teeth into.

“Who made ’em?” I smacked.

“That,” says he, “is something I have yet to find out.”

“Don’t you know?” I stared.

He slowly shook his head.

“It may seem to you, Jerry, that I just jumped[20] into this Pickle Parlor scheme on a moment’s notice. But it’s a fact I’ve been twisting the scheme around in my head for the past two days. And what put it into my head in the first place was this jar of pickles. Pickles like these, I told myself, would make a storekeeper rich in no time, providing he had enough of them to sell. And what fun it would be, I thought, to run a store of that kind. A Pickle Parlor! The name popped into my head just like that,” and he snapped his fingers in illustration. “But I ran up against a snag when I tried to find out who had made the pickles. I have them here, as you can see. But I don’t know where they came from.”

[20]

“But surely,” says I, puzzled over his words, “they didn’t drop out of the sky.”

“Last Saturday,” he explained, “the ladies of the Presbyterian missionary society held a food sale in Drake’s store. And there is where I bought the jar of pickles. I didn’t ask who made them, for I wasn’t interested ... then. And when I tried to find out later on no one seemed to know. First, I was sent to Mrs. Bowman on Elm Street. No, she told me, after tasting the pickles, they weren’t out of her kitchen. Nor could she help me. But she’d like to buy 

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