"I shall be glad to have your help as a—what is it they call it—a pressman? I think that I shall have something ready to print to-morrow night," said Jimmie—and he did.
As Jimmie was the whole newspaper force except the head proof reader, the head reporter, and the head pressman, he had both to set the type and to write the newspaper himself. Writing compositions Jimmie detested, but writing a newspaper he found was not half bad.
A Type Enlarged
"Don't see what you can write about," his father said jokingly. "There's nothing doing in this house when you have to keep still."
Jimmie did not, however, suffer from any lack of news. In fact, his friends brought him so much that the second day he started a baseball column and the third day a society column.
The type setting was interesting to Jimmie because it was all new to him. His type was just like the type in a printing office. Each piece was a thin bar of metal with a raised letter on the end, unless it had a punctuation mark instead of the letter, or was blank in order to make proper spaces between the words. Each letter of a word had to be picked up by itself out of the case of type and put in place before the next letter of the word could be placed where it belonged.
It was slow work and it was a little hard at first to be spelling a line of words with every letter upside down, but Jimmie found out the very first thing that it had to be so if the words were to be right side up on the printed page. It made Widow look like this:
