ime when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the
ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small
provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely
connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris,
the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which
the language owes a figure of speech--"the press groans" was no mere
rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used
in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand
on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type
was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble,
literally deserved its name of "impression-stone." Modern machinery
has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press
which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for
the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that
something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome-Nicolas
Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it plays a part in
this chronicle of great small things.

Sechard had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a "bear" in
compositors' slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the pressman
from ink-table to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt suggested
the nickname. The "bears," however, make matters even by calling the
compositors monkeys, on account of the nimble industry displayed by
those gentlemen in picking out the type from the hundred and fifty-two
compartments of the cases.

In the disastrous year 1793, Sechard, being fifty years old and a
married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the bulk of
French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only hand left in
the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the "gaffer") died,
leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed to be on the verge
of extinction; for the solitary "bear" was quite incapable of the feat
of transformation into a "monkey," and in his quality of pressman had
never learned to read or write. Just then, however, a Representative
of the People being in a mighty hurry to publish the Decrees of
the Convention, bestowed a master printer's license on Sechard, and
requisitioned the establishment. Citizen Sechard accepted the dangerous
patent, bought the business of his master's widow with his wife's
savings, and took over the plant at half its value. But he wa