a need of the moment. With a right-hand man
at my right hand (when he wasn't at my left) I could, I felt sure,
increase my own output enormously; and I began to plan out my daily
work under the reconstruction scheme.

I will call him "Snaggs"; that will save me the trouble of having to
write "my right-hand man" every time I want to refer to him; but when
he enters my service such economy of labour will not, of course,
be necessary. Snaggs, then, will arrive punctually at nine every
morning--no, on second thoughts he will sleep in, in case an
inspiration that needs recording arrives after I have gone to bed. (I
shrink from estimating how much wealth I have lost through going to
sleep on my nocturnal inspirations, which the most thorough search
next morning never avails to recapture; but a speaking-tube, with
alarm attachment, running into Snaggs's room will alter all that.)

His first duty of the day will be to wade through all the newspapers
and cut out any paragraphs that may serve as pegs for an article or a
set of verses. My own difficulty in this respect has always been that
I can never manage to get through more than one paper in a working
morning, and not all of that; invariably my attention gets caught
by some long and instructive but (for my purposes) hopelessly
unsuggestive dissertation on Pedigree Pigs or The Co-operative
Movement in Lower Papua, and I consequently overlook many of those
inspiring little "stories" that inform us, for example, that a
distinguished physician advocates the use of tomato-sauce as a
hair-restorer.

By the time I have finished breakfast, I reckon, Snaggs will have
found me subjects for at least a dozen effusions, neatly arranged with
a few skeleton suggestions for the treatment of each. I shall first
decide which are to be handled in prose and which in verse, and in the
case of the latter shall jot down a few words and phrases that will
obviously have to be dragged in as line-endings. Then I shall put
Snaggs on to the purely mechanical drudgery of finding all the
possible rhymes to these words (_e.g._, fascinate, assassinate,
pro-Krassinate--you know the sort of thing that's called for), and by
the time he has catalogued them all I shall have dashed off most of
the prose articles, which Snaggs will then proceed to type while I am
engaged in the comparatively simple task of piecing together the verse
jigsaws. In this way I should easily be able to earn an ordinary
week's takings