CHAPTER VII.
THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY I Arthur Dayson, though a very good shorthand writer, and not without experience as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor, was a nincompoop.
There could be no other explanation of his bland, complacent indifference as he sat poking at a coke stove one cold night of January, 1880, in full view of a most marvellous and ravishing spectacle.

The stove was in a room on the floor above the offices labelled as Mr.Q.
Karkeek's; its pipe, supported by wire stays, went straight up nearly to the grimy ceiling, and then turned horizontally and disappeared through a clumsy hole in the scorched wall.

It was a shabby stove, but not more so than the other few articles of furniture--a large table, a small desk, three deteriorated cane-chairs, two gas brackets, and an old copying-press on its rickety stand.

The sole object that could emerge brightly from the ordeal of the gas-flare was a splendid freshly printed blue poster gummed with stamp-paper to the wall: which poster bore the words, in vast capitals of two sizes: "_The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_." Copies of this poster had also been fixed, face outwards, on the two curtainless black windows, to announce to the Market Square what was afoot in the top storey over the ironmonger's.
A young woman, very soberly attired, was straining at the double iron-handles of the copying-press.

Some copying-presses have a screw so accurately turned and so well oiled, and handles so massively like a fly-wheel, that a touch will send the handles whizzing round and round till they stop suddenly, and then one slight wrench more, and the letters are duly copied! But this was not such a press.