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Every court and alley whispers of books and of the making of books: forms of type, trundled noisily on trolleys by ink-smeared boys, salute the wayfarer at odd corners; piles of strawboard, rolls or bales of paper, drums of printing-ink or roller composition stand on the pavement outside dark entries; basement windows give glimpses into Hadean caverns tenanted by legions of printer's devils; and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odors of glue and paste and oil.
Not a drawing. The impression of an ink-smeared hand laid flat on the paper. This touch of his own little daughter had been always on his heart, as he had come year after year to Calcutta, to sell his wares in the streets. Tears came to my eyes. I forgot that he was a poor Cabuli fruit-seller, while I was but no, what was I more than he? He also was a father.
For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years before, in the shack up-river. And the latter was surprised at learning how much of it was no longer news.
When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
He touched lightly and inconsequentially upon certain days when Old Tom would hang for hours over an old tin box filled with soiled and ink-smeared memoranda, periods which were always followed by days of moody silence and a week or more of "lessons" in a tattered and thumbed reader which the woodsman had brought up-river lessons as painful and laborious to Old Tom as they were delightful to the starved mentality of the pupil.
"That's him now," said an ink-smeared lad, and nodded toward a tall, gangling, mustachioed fellow in a black felt hat who had just come up the stairs. Queed marched straight for the little cubbyhole where the proof-readers and copy-holders sweated through their long nights. "You are Mr. Pat, head proof-reader of the Post?" "That's me, sor," said Mr.
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