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Updated: May 12, 2025
It is, we are told in a very familiar illustration, as absurd to imagine that the world as it exists is the work of unguided natural forces, as it would be to believe that the rows of letters in a compositor's "stick" had of their own contained force arranged themselves in intelligible sentences. The absurdity of the last supposition is admitted, but why is that so?
Edwin, accustomed though he was to the mildness of Big James's deportment, did not on the instant grasp that the man was seriously announcing a solemn resolve made under deep emotion. But as he understood, tears came into Edwin's eyes, and he thrilled at the swift and dramatic revelation of the compositor's feeling for his employer. Its impressiveness was overwhelming and it was humbling.
Old Samuel Quirk was wheeled in in an invalid chair, but, though he smiled urbanely on the company, he did not gather the significance of the proceedings, for he was now as much an infant as the head compositor's youngest baby. Father Healy came to bless the proceedings, and Dr. Marsh to stand by in case of sickness. After the dinner Cairns rose to his feet, to the sound of loud applause.
When she looked at him, and listened to him, Elizabeth involuntarily thought of Benjamin Franklin, and of many more who had raised themselves from the ink-pot and the compositor's desk to fame and eminence, and she fancied that such might be the lot of "little Tommy Cliffe." Why not? If so, how excessively proud she should be!
Then he stopped and looked at his chief in wordless astonishment. His sympathy had been wasted. "No," laughed Hollis, divining the cause of the compositor's astonishment, "personally I have no use for a brain specialist. I was thinking of some other person." "Not me?" grinned Potter from behind his type case.
Then there was no pause or slumber for him; his attention was concentrated on his varied and difficult subjects till the moment when he rushed with disordered garments to the printer's office. There, seated anywhere on the corner of a table, at a compositor's frame, or before a foreman's bureau he became completely absorbed in the colossal labour of reading and correcting his proofs.
That's to show it isn't the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!" Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the attention of both of them wavered. Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all importance for Hilda as Mr. Cannon came into the room.
That the uninitiated reader may form some practical conception of my meaning, I propose to set down a few items from the weekly contents of a compositor's "bill-book," slightly enlarging his brief entries with the view of rendering them the more intelligible.
He had not learned the art at school; for he left school altogether when he was fourteen years of age. At that early period of life, he entered into the printing-office of the New England Galaxy, learning to set type, and, shortly, came to have charge of the making up of the paper. My father often said that the best school education one could get was at the compositor's stand.
Then when the compositor's "stick" is full, or two and a half inches have been set, the type has to be taken out and placed in a long channel, or "galley." Each of these three operations requires considerable time and close application, and with each change there is the possibility of error. It is a long, expensive process.
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