machine, producing their effect in the
twentieth. But it needed a strong hand to bestir its smooth
plum-coloured limbs of metal, and a speed of a hundred an hour meant
gentle perspiration. The machine was loved like an animal.

Near this honourable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire
treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new,
and full of natty little devices. It worked with the lightness of
something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print
delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest
purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large
double-pointed case-rack, completed the tale of machines. That
case-rack alone held fifty different founts of type, and there were
other caseracks. The lead-rack was nearly as large, and beneath the
lead-rack was a rack containing all those "furnitures" which help to
hold a forme of type together without betraying themselves to the reader
of the printed sheet. And under the furniture rack was the `random,'
full of galleys. Then there was a table with a top of solid stone, upon
which the formes were bolted up. And there was the ink-slab, another
solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were inked. Rollers of various
weightiness lay about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal
galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the
impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy
of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was
excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding,
unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously
soft.

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

FIVE.

The only unintimidating phenomena in the crowded place were the
lye-brushes, the dusty job-files that hung from the great transverse
beams, and the proof-sheets that were scattered about. These printed
things showed to what extent Darius Clayhanger's establishment was a
channel through which the life of the town had somehow to pass.
Auctions, meetings, concerts, sermons, improving lectures, miscellaneous
entertainments, programmes, catalogues, deaths, births, marriages,
specifications, municipal notices, summonses, demands, receipts,
subscription-lists, accounts, rate-forms, lists of voters, jury-lists,
inaugurations, closures, bill-heads, handbills, addresses,
vis