By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me.  There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press.  I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day.  The stairway is dingy and irregular.  My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office.  Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand.  I go timidly up to the fattest of the three.  He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the heat painfully.  He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I say: 

“I seen your ad. in the paper this morning.”

“You’re rather late,” is his answer.  “I’ve got two girls engaged already.”

“Too late!” I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me.  I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask: 

“Say, are you sure those girls’ll come?  You can’t always count on us, you know.”

He laughs at this.  “Have you ever run a Gordon press?”

“No, sir; but I’m awful handy.”

“Where have you been working?”

“At J.’s in Lake Street.”

“What did you make?”

“A dollar a day.”

“Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I’ll tell you then whether I can give you anything to do.”

“Can’t you be sure now?”

Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.

“Well,” the fat man says indulgently, “you come in to-morrow morning at eight and I’ll give you a job.”

The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying apprenticeship.

The noise of a single press is deafening.  In the room where I work there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing machines back of them.  On one side of the room only are there windows.  The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer’s ink and cheap paper.  A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing coloured advertisements.  The work is all done standing; the hours are from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty on Saturdays.  It is to feed a machine that I am paid three dollars a week.  The expression is admirably chosen.  The machine’s iron jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch.  It is nervous work.  Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an afternoon’s work.