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! Perny; there's plenty of time," said Van Dorn, pacifically. "Stony and I are Committee on Circulation." "That's so," said Livingstone. "We had one man to-day who wanted to put copies of our first issue into seventeen million packages of starch for distribution throughout the entire civilized world. Van told him it was a stiff proposition." "He didn't see the joke, though," complained Van Dorn, in a grieved voice, "and he looked at us pityingly when I told him we had a better scheme." "You didn't hint at what it was, of course," said Perner, anxiously. "Not much! He'd have gobbled it up in a minute if I had." Perner dropped into a chair and stretched out his feet. "When Bates comes we'll turn a lot of these fellows over to him," he mused aloud. "The rooms below us are empty. We'll get them and put him in there. Then we can all get down to work."