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"Oh, from the office of the Daily Day-before-yesterday. I had an article in, and I wanted to read the proof. I can stand any thing in the world better than I can endure a compositor's blunders. Do any of you know Dr. Ashton?" "I do," somebody answered. "What of him?" "Rather clever fellow, wasn't he?" "Why, yes; I think he is. He's rather odd sometimes. What about him?" "Dead." "Nonsense!
The wonderful thing which had caught Herbert's attention was a dry printing press. Mad. de Rosier was glad to procure this little machine for Herbert, for she hoped that the new associations of pleasure which he would form with the types in the little compositor's stick, would efface the painful remembrance of his early difficulties with the syllables in the spelling-book.
In October, 1846, General Stager changed his location from the compositor's case to the telegraph operator's desk, commencing work as an operator in Philadelphia. With the extension of the lines westward, he removed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then crossed the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, where he was the pioneer operator.
As for an amanuensis that is only a nominal task, I write as fast as most people, and I cannot follow my ideas, let me scribble for life, as I may say; and as for my writing being illegible, that's the compositor's concern not mine. It's his business to make it out, and therefore I never have mine copied.
The compositor's mouth drooped at the corners, and he interrupted gloomily: "But it wouldn't get here till to-morrow." "True; it would not." They fell into a despondent reverie, with their chins in their bosoms. There came a cheerful voice from the next room, but to them it brought no cheer; in their ears it sounded weak from the need of food and faint with piteous reproach.
"The burial was happily over, conducted by the French priest, as the woman was a Roman Catholic to the last. Gerald was sitting up by the window, so changed that we should not have known him, except for the wonderful likeness to Felix that has come upon him. It seems that he had not only all the writing of that horrid paper to do, but all the compositor's work, or whatever you call it.
We do not see in Bakunin that proletarian in wooden sabots and blouse, with the eager thirst for knowledge and keen desire to raise himself, who dreams as he works before the compositor's frame of a juster order of things in this world, yet more for others than for himself, and would like to arrange society itself laboriously in a well-ordered compositor's case; nor do we see in Bakunin that plain German schoolmaster who would people society with mere sons of Prometheus, while he himself totters starving to the grave; who dedicates his gospel of a doctrine that would overthrow the world from pole to pole "to his Darling, Marie Donhardt," as though it were a tender love-song.
In a page of this size there are more than a thousand separate pieces of type, which, if set by hand, would have to be taken one by one and placed in the compositor's "stick"; then when the line is nearly set it would have to be spaced out, or "justified," to fill out the line exactly.
As the second volume was slowly printing, from manuscript that was barely dry when it went into the compositor's hands, the publisher intimated that the work might grow to a length that would consume the profits. To set his mind at rest, the last chapter was actually written, printed, and paged, several weeks before the chapters which precede it were even thought of.
And this, too, one must remark: the man himself, alone that is, never attains this self-recognition, try as he will; his eyes cannot see his own defects, just as the compositor's wearied eyes cannot see the slips he makes; another fresh eye is needed for that.
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