had apparently found it beyond belief that so beautiful a bird should not be toothsome in any single part.  But the discoverer of this sacrilege was not horrified as he would have been a year before.  He had even the breadth of mind to feel an honest sympathy for poor Mouser, who had come upon arsenic where it could not by any known law of Nature have been apprehended, and who for two days remained beneath the woodshed sick unto death, and was not his old self for weeks thereafter.  Wilbur was growing up.

Soon after this the other notable event transpired.  Frank, the dog, became the proud but worried mother of five puppies, all multicoloured like himself.  It is these ordeals that mature the soul, and it was an older Wilbur who went again to the Advance office to learn the loose trade, as his father had written him from New Orleans that he must be sure to do.  He had increased his knowledge of convention in the use of capital letters, and that summer, as a day’s work, he set up a column of leaded long primer which won him the difficult praise of Sam Pickering.  Sam wrote a notice of the performance and printed it in the Advance—­the budding craftsman feeling a double glow when he sat this up, too.  The item predicted that Wilbur Cowan, son of our fellow townsman, Dave Cowan, would soon become one of the swiftest of compositors.

This summer he not only inked the forms on Wednesday, but he was permitted to operate the job press.  You stood before this and turned a large wheel at the left to start it, after which you kept it going with one foot on a treadle.  Then rhythmically the press opened wide its maw and you took out the printed card or small bill and put in another before the jaws closed down.  It was especially thrilling, because if you should keep your hand in there until the jaws closed you wouldn’t have it any longer.

But there was disquieting news about the loose trade he intended to follow.  A new printer brought this.  He was the second since the deaf one of the year before, the latter on an hour’s notice having taken the six-fifty-eight for Florida one night in early winter—­like one of the idle rich, Sam Pickering said.  The new printer, a sour, bald one of middle age, reported bitterly that hand composition was getting to be no good nowadays; you had to learn the linotype, a machine that was taking the bread out of the mouths of honest typesetters.  He had beheld one of these heinous mechanisms operated in a city office—­by a slip of a girl that wouldn’t know how to hold a real stick in her hand—­and things had come to a pretty pass.  It was an intricate machine, with thousands of parts, far more than seemed at all necessary.  If you weren’t right about machinery, and too old to learn new tricks, what were you going to do?  Get sent to the printer’s home, that was all!  The new printer drank heavily to assuage his gloom, even to a degree that caused Herman Vielhaber to decline his custom, so that he must lean the gloomy hours away on the bar of Pegleg McCarron, where they didn’t mind such things.  Sam Pickering warned him that if this kept on there would no longer be jobs for hand compositors, even in country printing offices; that he, for one, would probably solve his own labour problem by installing a machine and running it himself.  But the sad printer refused to be warned and went from bad to worse.