When Eve took the management of the business, she began by taking stock. She set Kolb and Marion and Cérizet to work, and the workshop was put to rights, cleaned out, and set in order. Then one evening when David came in from a country excursion, followed by an old woman with a huge bundle tied up in a cloth, Eve asked counsel of him as to the best way of turning to profit the odds and ends left them by old Séchard, promising that she herself would look after the business. Acting upon her husband’s advice, Mme. Séchard sorted all the remnants of paper which she found, and printed old popular legends in double columns upon a single sheet, such as peasants paste on their walls, the histories of _The Wandering Jew_, _Robert the Devil_, _La Belle Maguelonne_ and sundry miracles. Eve sent Kolb out as a hawker. Cérizet had not a moment to spare now; he was composing the naive pages, with the rough cuts that adorned them, from morning to night; Marion was able to manage the taking off; and all domestic cares fell to Mme. Chardon, for Eve was busy coloring the prints. Thanks to Kolb’s activity and honesty, Eve sold three thousand broad sheets at a penny apiece, and made three hundred francs in all at a cost of thirty francs. But when every peasant’s hut and every little wine-shop for twenty leagues round was papered with these legends, a fresh speculation must be discovered; the Alsacien could not go beyond the limits of the department. Eve, turning over everything in the whole printing house, had found a collection of figures for printing a “Shepherd’s Calendar,” a kind of almanac meant for those who cannot read, letterpress being replaced by symbols, signs, and pictures in colored inks, red, black and blue. Old Séchard, who could neither read nor write himself, had made a good deal of money at one time by bringing out an almanac in hieroglyph. It was in book form, a single sheet folded to make one hundred and twenty-eight pages. Thoroughly satisfied with the success of the broad sheets, a piece of business only undertaken by country printing offices, Mme. Séchard invested all the proceeds in the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, and began it upon a large scale. Millions of copies of this work are sold annually in France. It is printed upon even coarser paper than the _Almanac of Liege_, a ream (five hundred sheets) costing in the first instance about four francs; while the printed sheets sell at the rate of a halfpenny apiece--twenty-five francs per ream.