“I didn’t say anything about a Peanut Parlor.”

“Well, a Pickle Parlor is just as crazy. You can’t make it work. For pickles are groceries. And the place to buy them is in a grocery store.”

[3]“Jerry, if you wanted to buy a good cheap stove poker, what store would you go to?”

[3]

“To the Stove-poker Parlor,” says I, tickled over my own smartness.

“Be serious.”

“Well,” I complied generously, “I might try the ten-cent store.”

“But a stove poker is hardware. So, if your argument holds good, ought you not to go to a hardware store?”

“Tra-la-la,” says I. “Isn’t it a beautiful day.”

“The point is,” says he, “that people will buy hardware in a novelty store, or, for that matter, anything in any kind of a store, if you make it an object for them to do so.”

“Anyway,” says I, yawning, “running a store is a man’s job. So that lets us out.”

But he was as unmoved as though he were the hill of Gibraltar itself, or whatever you call it.

“Of course,” he reflected, referring to the suggested partnership, “it will be a fifty-fifty proposition.”

Seeing that it was useless to argue with him further, I sort of resigned myself to my fate as his pickle partner.

“I have a hunch,” says I, “that it’s going to be a whole lot worse than that. A Pickle Parlor! We’ll be the laugh of the town.”

[4]“The Wright brothers were laughed at when they tried to fly. And Edison was laughed at when he started working on his talking machine. The easiest thing some people can do is to ridicule any new idea that comes up. But we should worry how much the Tutter people laugh at us. To that point, I’d rather have them laugh at us than ignore us. For to be ridiculed is recognition of a sort.”

[4]

“Help!” I cried, holding my head. “Get the dictionary.”

That set Poppy to laughing. And if you 

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