mes. Gluck reassured him on this
point; he said his men were so loyal that they preferred to bring their
food with them rather than have the paper delayed. Later on he casually
mentioned that there was a back entrance. He would not allow Raphael to
talk to his workmen personally, arguing that it spoiled their
discipline. By eleven o'clock at night seven pages had been pulled and
corrected: but the eighth page was not forthcoming. The _Flag_ had to be
machined, dried, folded, and a number of copies put into wrappers and
posted by three in the morning. The situation looked desperate. At a
quarter to twelve, Gluck explained that a column of matter already set
up had been "pied" by a careless compositor. It happened to be the
column containing the latest news and Raphael had not even seen a proof
of it. Still, Gluck conjured him not to trouble further: he would give
his reader strict injunctions not to miss the slightest error. Raphael
had already seen and passed the first column of this page, let him leave
it to Gluck to attend to this second column; all would be well without
his remaining later, and he would receive a copy of the _Flag_ by the
first post. The poor editor, whose head was splitting, weakly yielded;
he just caught the midnight train to the West End and he went to bed
feeling happy and hopeful.

At seven o'clock the next morning the whole Leon household was roused by
a thunderous double rat-tat at the door. Addie was even heard to scream.
A housemaid knocked at Raphael's door and pushed a telegram under it.
Raphael jumped out of bed and read: "Third of column more matter wanted.
Come at once. Gluck."

"How can that be?" he asked himself in consternation. "If the latest
news made a column when it was first set up before the accident, how can
it make less now?"

He dashed up to Gluck's office in a hansom and put the conundrum to him.

"You see we had no time to distribute the 'pie,' and we had no more type
of that kind, so we had to reset it smaller," answered Gluck glibly. His
eyes were blood-shot, his face was haggard. The door of the private
compartment stood open.

"Your men are not come yet, I suppose," said Raphael.

"No," said Gluck. "They didn't go away till two, poor fellows. Is that
the copy?" he asked, as Raphael handed him a couple of slips he had
distractedly scribbled in the cab under the heading of "Talmudic Tales."
"Thank you, it's just about the size. I shall have to set it myself."

"B