He jumped to his feet and shouted, “March, I’ll do it!”

“What?”

“I’ll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I’ll have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I’ll paint the town red!”

March looked aghast at him.  “Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!”

“I mean it.  I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar.  Cornhill Magazine.  Sixpence.  Not a dull page in it.’  I said to myself then that it was the livest thing I ever saw.  I respected the man that did that thing from the bottom of my heart.  I wonder I ever forgot it.  But it shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best.”

“You infamous mountebank!”, said March, with great amusement at Fulkerson’s access; “you call that congeries of advertising instinct of yours the human mind at its best?  Come, don’t be so diffident, Fulkerson.  Well, I’m off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfoos will have you under control.  I don’t suppose you’ll be quite sane again till after the first number is out.  Perhaps public opinion will sober you then.”

“Confound it, March!  How do you think they will take it?  I swear I’m getting so nervous I don’t know half the time which end of me is up.  I believe if we don’t get that thing out by the first of February it ’ll be the death of me.”

“Couldn’t wait till Washington’s Birthday?  I was thinking it would give the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if—­”

“No, I’ll be dogged if I could!” Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement.  “I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I’ll kill him.”

“Well, I shouldn’t mind your killing Beaton,” said March, tranquilly, as he went out.

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham Square.  He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever.  He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and characters to his inspection.  They draw not only from the up-town American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming between them and the East River.  He had found that, according to the hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd.  Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed