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On one side of every piece of type there is a groove, so that he can tell by touch whether it is right side up or not. He must look out especially to make his right-hand margins regular. You will notice in books that the lines are all of the same length, although they do not contain the same number of letters. The compositor brings this about by arranging his words and spaces skillfully.

Both remembered him as a delightful companion, generous to a fault, glorying in youth, negligent of his affairs, issuing 'The Long Islander' at random intervals, once a week, once in two weeks, once in three, until its financial backers lost faith and hope and turned him out, and with him the whole office corps; for Walt himself was editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, and printer's devil, all in one."

Under its shade a round of light fell on his Euripides, open at the page he had been reading the night before. He saw it very black, with the edges a little wavering, a little blurred, as if it had been burnt by fire into the whiteness of the page. Below, the smaller type of a chorus reeled and shook through all its lines. Set up by an intoxicated compositor.

At fifteen he wandered to California, the state which has so vividly colored his best known short stories. The first three years he was there, for a living, he taught school, and, as a pastime, like every one else in California at that time, he dug for gold. He then entered the office of the Golden Era as a compositor, but soon began to write articles for the paper.

Another machine, invented by Mergenthaler, practically sets up the moulds, by a sort of typewriter arrangement, for a line at a time, and then a casting is taken of a whole line at once. This machine is used much in newspaper offices, where the cleverness of the compositor has to be depended upon and there is little or no time for corrections.

She wanted so much to hear more about the possibility of an escape. "I must see Vyesovshchikov," said Nikolay. "All right. To-morrow I'll tell you when and where," replied Sasha. "What is he going to do?" asked Sofya, pacing through the room. "It's been decided to make him compositor in a new printing place. Until then he'll stay with the forester." Sasha's brow lowered.

A few antique newspapers lay on the table beside an inkstand containing some black lacquer-like substance, and a collection of quill pens twisted into stars. Sundry dirty scraps of paper, covered with almost undecipherable hieroglyphs, proved to be manuscript articles torn across the top by the compositor to check off the sheets as they were set up.

The reserved and slightly eccentric character of the neighbours had something to do with this separation, but social distinctions counted for more. A compositor was, after all, a mere workman, and Keith felt instinctively that his mother looked with kindly contempt at the more primitive ways of the adjoining household.

He now reverted to the contrast with the compositor, turned a begun letter upside down, and showed how unseemly it would be to write any thing from the bottom to the top, or from the right to the left, with other things of like kind with which whole volumes might have been filled.

The most remarkable compositor ever in the Northwest, if not in the United States, was the late Charles R. Stuart. He claimed to be a lineal descendant of the royal house of Stuart. For two years in succession he won the silver cup in New York city for setting more type than any of his competitors.