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