Buchanan explained the linotypes to me. I watched, as though
romantically dreaming, the flashing descent of letter after letter, a
rain of letters into the belly of the machine; then, going round to the
back, I watched the same letters rising again in a close, slow
procession, and sorting themselves by themselves at the top in readiness
to answer again to the tapping, tapping of a man in a once-white apron.
And while I was watching all that I could somehow, by a faculty which we
have, at the same time see pigeons far overhead, arriving and arriving
out of the murk from beyond the verge of chimneys.
"Ingenious, isn't it?" said Stirling.
But I imagine that he had not the faculty by which to see the pigeons.
A reverend, bearded, spectacled man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up
and an apron stretched over his hemispherical paunch, strolled slowly
along an alley, glancing at a galley-proof with an ingenuous air just as
if he had never seen a galley-proof before.
"It's a stick more than a column already," said he confidentially,
offering the long paper, and then gravely looking at Buchanan, with head
bent forward, not through his spectacles but over them.
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