of an intricate mechanical problem.  The pinkish claws seemed to grope—­and after an instant of hesitation the thing was done, the problem solved; the pigeon, with delicious gracefulness, had established equilibrium on the ridge of a pigeon-cote, and folded its wings, and was peering about with strange motions of its extremely movable head.  Presently it flew down to the leads, waddled to and fro with the ungainly gestures of a fat woman of sixty, and disappeared into the cote.  At the same moment the boy who had been dismissed from the sub-editor’s room ran forward and entered the cote by a wire-screened door.

“Handy things, pigeons!” said the doctor as we approached to examine the cote.  Fifty or sixty pigeons were cooing and strutting in it.  There was a protest of wings as the boy seized the last arriving messenger.

“Give it here!” Buchanan ordered.

The boy handed over a thin tube of paper which he had unfastened from the bird’s leg.  Buchanan unrolled it and showed it to me.  I read:  “Midland Federation.  Axe United, Macclesfield Town.  Match abandoned after half-hour’s play owing to fog.  Three forty-five.”

“Three forty-five,” said Buchanan, looking at his watch.  “He’s done the ten miles in half an hour, roughly.  Not bad.  First time we tried pigeons from as far off as Axe.  Here, boy!” And he restored the paper to the boy, who gave it to another boy, who departed with it.

“Man,” said the doctor, eyeing Buchanan.  “Ye’d no business out here.  Ye’re not precisely a pigeon.”

Down we went, one after another, by the ladder, and now we fell into the composing-room, where Buchanan said he felt warmer.  An immense, dirty, white-washed apartment crowded with linotypes and other machines, in front of which sat men in white aprons, tapping, tapping—­gazing at documents pinned at the level of their eyes—­and tapping, tapping.  A kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots in the ceiling!  In this jungle there was scarcely room for us to walk.  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.