ons there were a legion. Monthlies
and weeklies of which Perner had not even heard marshalled their clans
and swooped down in companies, battalions, and brigades. All of these he
could turn over to Bates when he came on: the printers, engravers,
contributors, and the people with circulation schemes were enough for
him.

As to the latter contingent, Van Dorn and Livingstone relieved him
somewhat, and rather enjoyed doing so. It was in the nature of a
diversion to them to listen to these wordy emissaries of the east wind,
who unfolded more or less startling schemes that ranged all the way from
a house-to-house canvass for subscribers, through various voting
contests, up to the securing by lobby an act of Congress adopting the
paper as the official organ of some forty millions of school-children.
It was more pleasant to listen and to discuss with this garrulous
advance-guard of fortune in her various guises than to pursue her more
ploddingly at the easel. This gave some relief to Perner, though, on the
whole, he would have preferred seeing them at work. Livingstone, it is
true, did work feverishly at his painting now and then, for as much as
an hour or more at a time, and between him and Van Dorn the various
headings and one or two other drawings had come into being. But there
was still much for them to do, and their seeming inability to get down
to business, now that matters were really under way, was sometimes, as
he had hinted to Barrifield, altogether discouraging. Later in the day
he abused them roundly.

"How do you expect we are going to get out a paper once a week?" he
asked. There had come the lull which precedes lunch-time, and Perner was
standing in his door and glaring at them with undisguised scorn. His
disarranged hair and the light on his glasses gave him the appearance of
a very tall beetle. "Once a week! Do you know what that means? It means
not once a year, nor once a month, but every seven days! Here we've been
going nearly seven months, and you haven't got pictures for one issue
yet! How in the world do you expect to get out from six to eight
pictures a week for the next issues? That's what you've got to do, you
know, until we get started and money is coming in to buy outside work
with. Even then we can't depend on that for the class of stuff we want.
You could do it, too, without turning a hair, if you'd just puncture a
few of these wind-bags that come along, and get down to work!"

"Oh, pshaw! Pern