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A boy with an ink-smeared face was setting type and a pallid gentleman with glasses was languidly working a hand-press. A pile of fresh-smelling papers lay on a table, and after a question or two he picked up one. Two of its four pages were covered with announcements of suits and sales to satisfy judgments the printing of which was the raison d'etre of the noble sheet.
Fitzpatrick Smart punished them so terribly, that they at last abandoned him in despair to his own devices. Several men of this class were under the authority of the Inchrule, and their communings were instructive. "Thorpe's catalogue just arrived, sir several highly important announcements," says a portly person with a fat volume under his arm, hustling forward with an air of assured consequence.
And these announcements, set in huge type, could be read on the copies of the paper, which the hawkers flourished like banners. Accustomed as it was to such filth, saturated with infamy, the crowd continued on its way without paying much attention.
They have barely passed the portals, when they set up their morning cry, in a shrill, sharp tone, "'Ere's your ''Erald, 'Mornin' Times, 'Buy a Tribune?" etc. In the afternoon, they scream into your ears the names of the "News," "Mail," "Express," "Telegram," "Post," and other evening journals, flavoring their announcements with shouts such as these: "'Nuther murder!" "Tremendous sensation!"
The uncertain market; the slump, momentarily undiscernible, but mathematically inevitable; customers, credulous or sceptical, but always avid; the pulse of the feverish street which the ticker indifferently registered; the atmosphere of tobacco and greed; the trailing announcements; "Steel, three-fourths; Pennsy, a half," these things were forgotten. The train crashed on.
Grindhusen came out again on Monday morning, and we fell to digging as before. The old priest came out to look, and asked if we couldn't fix a post for him on the road up to the church. He needed it badly, that post; it had stood there before, but had got blown down; he used it for nailing up notices and announcements.
On account of my voice being in the right pitch, I expanded into a spieler, a front man, the person who makes the announcements in front of the curtain, that does the ballyhoo for the side show or bawls out, from the center ring, the features of the concert 'that will immediately fallaawftah this pawfo'mance.
Decision about employment or activity in the immediate future, was one thing that couldn't be dismissed. And announcements, beamed from the Moon, emphasized it: "Serenitatis Base, seventeenth month-day, sixteenth hour. Plastics-chemists, hydroponics specialists, machinists, mechanics, metallurgists, miners, helpers all are urgently needed. The tax-free pay will startle you.
Assured of my father's responsibility, the adventurous Peck put plenty of spirit into the first launch of "The Capitalist." All the walls were placarded with its announcements; circular advertisements ran from one end of the kingdom to the other. Agents were engaged, correspondents levied en masse.
Undoubtedly it is practised to keep the prisoners keyed up to a feverish pitch of hopefulness. Certainly it succeeded for a time, although such announcements at a later date, when we had seen through the subterfuge, were received with ironical cheering and jeers. At such a sudden and summary cleavage between families many distressing and pathetic scenes were witnessed.
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