He added fresh details recently obtained, and told how during the first month, when he had been waiting for his advertising to appear, he had been obliged to mortgage his household effects at five per cent. a week in order to live. He had received one thousand dollars in the first mail after the advertising appeared. And when that mail was brought in and laid on his desk he didn't have a dollar in his pocket--not a dollar. As Barrifield proceeded, any vague doubts of success that had crept into the minds of his listeners disappeared. They began the work of organization forthwith, and Van Dorn, who had faith in Perner's literary judgment, proposed that he be the editor. Perner, in turn, proposed Van Dorn as art editor, with Livingstone as his assistant. Barrifield was to be nominally business manager, though, for the reason that his present position consumed most of his time, and as the business offices for convenience were to be in the studios occupied by the other three, the management, such as it was, would for a while fall mostly upon Perner, who referred once more to his ten years' successful experience, and assumed his double responsibility with some dignity. A consideration of the first number's contents was then taken up, with the result that they were to prepare it mostly themselves. They were on familiar ground now, and Perner and Van Dorn each displayed some evidence of fitness for their respective positions. There must be two stirring serials, one of which they would buy. Barrifield knew where one could be had. Livingstone could do the pictures for this story. The other would be more in Van's line. Then they lighted cigars and went back to the premiums, and Barrifield launched into the details of his recent explorations and discoveries in the vast jungles of Premium Land. He had examined and priced everything, from a nut-cracker to a trip abroad. Presently he began to spread a number of these things on the table, which the waiter had once more cleared. Besides the watch and Bible, there was a fishing-kit, all but the rod, which was described fully in a leaflet, a bicycle lamp, a pamphlet outlining a tour through the Holy Land, sample pages of a cook-book, and a pair of ear-muffs. Barrifield arranged these on the cloth, explaining as he did so that a beautiful box kite had been too large to bring, as was also a gun of which he could get a limited quantity--a hundred thousand or so--at a ridiculously low figure. Van Dorn picked up the ear-muffs curiously. "What do these cost?" he asked. "Forty-eight cents a pair by the gross. Special inside figure because I told him we would want a quarter of a million pairs." Van Dorn looked at them a little closer. "The fellow I saw must have stolen his," he said, "for he was selling them yesterday on Broadway for twenty-five cents a pair."