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"When I first went in to the Daily Echo office, I saw a notice in the sub-editor's room which tickled me to death. Elsden, the night editor, had put it up, and it said that the word 'gutted' was not to be used in describing the state of a house after a fire. I went to Elsden ... I like him better than any one else in the Echo office ... and asked him what was the matter with the word.
And again raged the sale of the islands as penny salt- cellars, finger-basins, etc.; in broker's and sub-editor's office the tape-machine clicked the hourly progress of preparations at Spezzia; while every by-street was dreadful with that music-hall chorus: "To Spezzia runs the Pullman train; The Follies soon their sense will teach; We've Beech, O dear, upon the brain, He brains upon the beach".
The sub-editor's room or rooms, for there was an inner and an outer sanctum was in a remote dark corner of the building, so dark that gas was generally burning in it all day long, giving its occupants generally the washed-out pallid appearance of men who do not know when day ends or night begins.
Then, when at last I had received my subject, or had got leave to write upon some topic suggested by myself, I hurried to the sub-editor's room, and, sitting at a corner of a table upon which I laid my watch, dashed off my precious article at the top of my speed.
"What do you mean by believe? Do you, or do you not?" "Of course I do." "Then why couldn't you say so at once? Take this bit of copy and set it up at that case there. And you, young fellow, take these proofs to the sub-editor's room, and say I've not had the last sheet of the copy of the railway accident yet, and I'm standing for it. Cut away." Horace went off.
"After all," thought he to himself, "what's the use of being particular? I suppose I'm what they call a `printer's devil'; nothing like starting modestly! Here goes for my lords the sub-editors, and the last page of the railway accident." And he spent a festive ten-minutes hunting out the sub-editor's domains, and possessing himself of the missing copy. With Reginald, however, it fared otherwise.
I said I should bear him in mind, and, after helping him to release his umbrella, saw him down the steps and watched him disappear. 'Thank Heaven! I said to Kate, 'we have seen the last of him. I was bitterly mistaken, for next morning when I entered the office, Bilger was there awaiting me, outside the sub-editor's room.
I can't put you at case, but they want a lad in the sub-editor's room. Do you know where that is?" "Yes, sir," said Horace, "I took some proofs there yesterday. But, sir " "Well, what?" said the manager, sharply. "Is there no possibility of Reginald and me being together?" faltered the boy. "Yes outside if you're discontented," said the manager.
And then my companion launched out into a lively description of the work of a newspaper office, and of the various stages in the production of a paper, from the pen and ink in the sub-editor's room to the printed, folded, and delivered newspaper which lies on one's breakfast-table every morning.
Presently it flew down to the leads, waddled to and fro with the ungainly gestures of a fat woman of sixty, and disappeared into the cote. At the same moment the boy who had been dismissed from the sub-editor's room ran forward and entered the cote by a wire-screened door. "Handy things, pigeons!" said the doctor as we approached to examine the cote.
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