Business'), was muddy,
littered, and damaged, as though a Juggernaut had passed that way.
Ladders reclined against the walls. Moreover, one of the windows of the
office had been taken out of its frame, leaving naught but an oblong
aperture. Through this aperture Edwin could see the busy, eager forms
of his father, Big James, and Chawner. Through this aperture had been
lifted, in parts and by the employment of every possible combination of
lever and pulley, the printing machine which Darius Clayhanger had so
successfully purchased in Manchester on the day of the free-and-easy at
the Dragon.

At the top of the flight of steps two apprentices, one nearly `out of
his time,' were ministering to the engine, which that morning did not
happen to be running. The engine, giving glory to the entire
establishment by virtue of the imposing word `steam', was a crotchety
and capricious thing, constant only in its tendency to break down. No
more reliance could be placed on it than on a pampered donkey.
Sometimes it would run, and sometimes it would not run, but nobody could
safely prophesy its moods. Of the several machines it drove but one,
the grand cylinder, the last triumph of the ingenuity of man, and even
that had to be started by hand before the engine would consent to work
it. The staff hated the engine, except during those rare hours when one
of its willing moods coincided with a pressure of business. Then, when
the steam was sputtering and the smoke smoking and the piston throbbing,
and the leathern belt travelling round and round and the complete
building a-tremble and a-clatter, and an attendant with clean hands was
feeding the sheets at one end of the machine and another attendant with
clean hands taking them off at the other, all at the rate of twenty
copies per sixty seconds--then the staff loved the engine and meditated
upon the wonders of their modern civilisation. The engine had been
known to do its five thousand in an afternoon, and its horse-power was
only one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

Edwin could not keep out of the printing office. He went
inconspicuously and, as it were, by accident up the stone steps, and
disappeared into the interior. When you entered the office you were
first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odours competing for your
attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin.
Despite the fact that the do