Messrs. Boolpin and Persimmon inquired, as a matter of form, whether their further assistance was needed, and were answered in the negative.  Whereupon they retired—­Mr. Boolpin uttering a farewell caution against driving more nails in the wall than were necessary, and not to cut the floor under any circumstances—­and the panorama and its adherents were left alone.

Mr. Boolpin had driven the uproarious boys before him with his pestle, administering smart taps to the reluctant ones.  Tiffles suffered no further annoyance from them that day, save an occasional “Boo! boo!” shouted through the keyhole, and followed by an immediate scampering of the perpetrators down stairs.  This well-known sound always roused the idiot to fury; and the peaceable persuasions, and even the gentle violence of Tiffles, were needed to keep him from relinquishing his work and springing to the door.

He was a most intelligent and useful idiot.  He could measure distances more accurately than either of the three, and could ply the saw, hammer, plane, or hatchet (Tiffles brought all these tools with him) like a carpenter.  His strength and skill were so great, that Tiffles found himself gratefully relieved from the necessity of lifting, or directing.  Marcus Wilkeson, who had also thrown off his coat with a manful determination to do a hard day’s work, in the hope of tiring out and driving away the sadness that possessed him, put on the garment again, and sat on a front bench, vacantly staring like an idiot at the idiot, and all the while thinking, gloomily, of New York.  Patching stalked about the hall, and criticized the work as it progressed, from numerous angles of observation; but even he confessed that he could make no improvement on Stoop’s highly artistic disposition of things.

The idiot worked on steadily and swiftly, and only two things interrupted him.  The first was the “Boo!” yelled through the keyhole, as heretofore described.  The second was the unrolling of portions of the panorama as they were taken out of the boxes, fastened together, and attached to the rollers.

As the canvas was unwound, Stoop would drop his saw, or hammer, or other tool, and gaze, with his large mouth and small eyes wide open, at the pictorial marvels successively disclosed.  “Blame it!” said he; “a’n’t that splendid?” or, “By jingo! look at that!” or, “Thunder! don’t that beat all?” The tigers’ tails and the elephants’ trunks, the alligators’ snouts and the boa constrictor’s convolutions, he recognized at once.  He had “read all about ’em in Olney’s Jogriffy.”

“He is an idiot of taste,” thought Patching.  “I wonder what they call him an idiot for?” thought Tiffles.  “It’s a pity all the people aren’t idiots,” said Marcus Wilkeson to Tiffles.  “Your panorama would be patronized and appreciated then.”  It was Marcus’s first approach to a joke that day.