water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in at the next. This
was an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottling
we needed special taps, and these, too, I invented and patented.

We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass
trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them up
to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in
the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped
in the cork and drove it home with a little mallet. Each tank, the
little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled
water, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that
stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl stood
ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to the
three packers, who slipped them into their outer papers and put them,
with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a little groove
from which they could be made to slide neatly into position in our
standard packing-case. It sounds wild, I know, but I believe I was the
first man in the city of London to pack patent medicines through the
side of the packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than by
the lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be put
into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled to the lift
that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded up the free space
and nailed on top and side. Our girls, moreover, packed with corrugated
paper and matchbook-wood box partitions when everybody else was using
expensive young men to pack through the top of the box with straw, many
breakages and much waste and confusion.

II

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted