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.