With the local merchants the results were less satisfying.  Bob West put in a card advertising his hardware business and Nib Corkins cautiously invested a half dollar to promote his drug store and stock of tarnished cheap jewelry; but Sam Cotting said everybody knew what he had for sale and advertising wouldn’t help him any.  Arthur drove to Huntingdon with Louise and while the society editor picked up items her husband interviewed the merchants.  The Huntingdon people were more interested in the new paper than the Millville folk, and Arthur quoted such low prices that several advertisements were secured.  Two bright boys of this thriving village were also employed to ride over to Millville each morning, get a supply of Tribunes and distribute a sample copy to every house in the neighborhood.

“Fitz” set up the “ads” in impressive type and the columns of the first edition began to fill up days before the Fourth of July arrived.  Louise had a story and two poems set in type and read over the proofs dozens of times with much pride and satisfaction, while Beth prepared an article on the history of baseball and the probable future of our national game.

They did not see much of their artist during the first days following her arrival, but one afternoon she brought Patsy a sketch and asked: 

“Who is this?”

Patsy glanced at it and laughed gleefully.  It was Peggy McNutt, the fish-eyed pooh-bah of Millville, who was represented sitting on his front porch engaged in painting his wooden foot.  This was one of McNutt’s recognized amusements.  He kept a supply of paints of many colors, and every few days appeared with his rudely carved wooden foot glistening with a new coat of paint and elaborately striped.  Sometimes it would be blue with yellow stripes, then green with red stripes, and anon a lovely pink decorated with purple.  One drawback to Peggy’s delight in these transformations was the fact that it took the paint a night and a day to dry thoroughly, and during this period of waiting he would sit upon his porch with the wooden foot tenderly resting upon the rail—­a helpless prisoner.

“Some folks,” he would say, “likes pretty neckties; an’ some wears fancy socks; but fer my part I’d ruther show a han’some foot ner anything.  It don’t cost as much as wearin’ socks an’ neckties, an’ it’s more artistic like.”

Hetty had caught the village character in the act of striping the wooden foot, and his expression of intense interest in the operation was so original, and the likeness so perfect, from the string suspenders and flannel shirt to the antiquated straw hat and faded and patched overalls, that no one would be likely to mistake the subject.  The sketch was entitled “The Village Artist,” and Patsy declared they would run it on an inside page, just to make the Millville people aware of the “power of the press.”  Larry made an etching of it and mounted the plate for a double column picture.  The original sketch Patsy decided to have framed and to hang it in her office.