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Bobby crossed the street, climbed a stairway slanting outside a square wooden store building and for the first time found himself in a printing office. Tall stands held tier after tier of type-cases, slid in like drawers. The tops were slanted. On them stood other cases, their queerly arranged and various-sized compartments exposed to view. Down the centre of the room ran a long table.
The little boy pulled open one after another the shallow drawers in the stand to which the press was fastened. Some were filled with leads and quoins and blocks. Some were regular type-cases, plenished with glittering new fonts all distributed. One contained a small composing stone, a cleaning brush, a composing stick, a pair of narrow-pointed pliers, a mallet and planer. Everything was complete.
The long stooping figure of Kosinksi, wrapped in his inseparable dark-blue overcoat, his fair hair showing from under his billycock hat, pushing the barrow, heavily laden with type-cases and iron forms, packets of literature and reams of printing paper; I in my shabby black dress and sailor hat, bearing the furled-up banner, and M'Dermott following on behind, carrying with gingerly care a locked-up form of type, the work of poor Armitage, which was in imminent danger of falling to pieces in the middle of the street.
Two hours later, when the noon whistles blew, Bobby said good-bye to his friend after a most interesting morning. Mr. Daggett had showed him everything. He explained how in the type-cases the capital letters occupied little compartments all alike and at the top, but how the small letters were arranged arbitrarily in various-sized compartments.
This was Ralston. What should bring Paul from the inky apron, and the dusty type-cases, and the battered old founts of metal, and the worm-eaten old founts of wood, and the slattern bankrupt office into the society of such a man as this? The Exile dreamed his dream, and a year was gone in a breath. The Armstrong household was asleep. It was one o'clock noon of the slumberous hours.
Squirrels scampered over its roof when it was not preoccupied by woodpeckers, and a printer's devil had once seen a nest-building blue jay enter the composing window, flutter before one of the slanting type-cases with an air of deliberate selection, and then fly off with a vowel in its bill.
In the slattern old office where Paul was learning more or less to be a workman at his trade there was no such thing as a ceiling. Frayed mortar, with matted scraps of cow-hair in it, used to fall frequently into the type-cases whenever a high wind shook the crazy slates, and, to obviate this, some contriving person had nailed a number of sheets of brown paper to the rafters.
So finally he was turned into the ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean.
Some literary-minded compositor in my father's employ had placed the book in a rack of type-cases, and had apparently forgotten it. It bore on many pages the stamp of some Young Men's Christian Association in a Northern town, and my literary-minded compositor seems to have looted it. It was my most valued possession for some years.
He went to the office of the local newspaper, and found the result he wanted in the type-cases of the compositors. The Morse, or rather Vail code, is at present the universal telegraphic code of symbols, and its use is extending to other modes of signalling-for example, by flags, lights, or trumpets.
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