d 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.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MILLVILLE DAILY TRIBUNE

The first edition of the _Millville Daily Tribune_ certainly proved it
to be a wonderful newspaper. The telegraphic news of the world's doings,
received and edited by the skillful Miss Briggs, was equal to that of
any metropolitan journal; the first page cartoon, referring to the
outbreak of a rebellion in China, was clever and humorous enough to
delight anyone; but the local news and "literary page" were woefully
amateurish and smacked of the schoolgirl editors who had