ad received them in quarter-sheets, tucked in at
separate windows; they had found them in the chimney, pinned against
the door, shot through attic-windows, delivered in long slips through
convenient keyholes, stuffed into ventilators, and occupying the same
can with the morning's milk. One subscriber, who waited for some time
at the office-door to have a personal interview with Wan Lee (then
comfortably locked in my bedroom), told me, with tears of rage in
his eyes, that he had been awakened at five o'clock by a most hideous
yelling below his windows; that, on rising in great agitation, he was
startled by the sudden appearance of "The Northern Star," rolled hard,
and bent into the form of a boomerang, or East-Indian club, that sailed
into the window, described a number of fiendish circles in the room,
knocked over the light, slapped the baby's face, "took" him (the
subscriber) "in the jaw," and then returned out of the window, and
dropped helplessly in the area. During the rest of the day, wads and
strips of soiled paper, purporting to be copies of "The Northern Star"
of that morning's issue, were brought indignantly to the office. An
admirable editorial on "The Resources of Humboldt County," which I had
constructed the evening before, and which, I had reason to believe,
might have changed the whole balance of trade during the ensuing year,
and left San Francisco bankrupt at her wharves, was in this way lost to
the public.

It was deemed advisable for the next three weeks to keep Wan Lee closely
confined to the printing-office, and the purely mechanical part of the
business. Here he developed a surprising quickness and adaptability,
winning even the favor and good will of the printers and foreman, who
at first looked upon his introduction into the secrets of their trade as
fraught with the gravest political significance. He learned to set type
readily and neatly, his wonderful skill in manipulation aiding him in
the mere mechanical act, and his ignorance of the language confining him
simply to the mechanical effort, confirming the printer's axiom, that
the printer who considers or follows the ideas of his copy makes a poor
compositor. He would set up deliberately long diatribes against himself,
composed by his fellow-printers, and hung on his hook as copy, and even
such short sentences as "Wan Lee is the devil's own imp," "Wan Lee is a
Mongolian rascal," and bring the proof to me with happiness beaming from
every tooth,