"Not quite. Uncle Jacob was going to ride out to Parma, and I gave him about forty, and asked him to hand them to people he met on the road."
"Y-e-s," said Phaeton, with a deep sigh; "and is that all?"
"I put a dozen or two on that little shelf by the post-office window," said Ned, "so that anybody who came for his letters could take one. And now that's all; and I hope you won't worry over one or two little mistakes. Everybody makes some mistakes. There is no use in pretending to be perfect. But if you two fellows had been here in the office, instead of going off to enjoy yourselves fishing and leaving me to do all the work, you might have had the old card just as you wanted it. Of course you'd have spelled it right, but there might have been bad taste about it that would look worse than my spelling. And now I'm going home to supper."
"The worst thing about Ned," said Phaeton, after he had gone, "is, that there's too much go-ahead in him. Very few people are troubled in that way."
"But what are we going to do about that dreadful card?" said I. "When the people see that, they may be afraid to give us any jobs, for fear that we'll misspell everything."
"I don't know what we can do now," said Phaeton, "unless we get out a good one, and say on it that no others are genuine. I must think about it over night."
CHAPTER X.
TORMENTS OF TYPOGRAPHY.
In spite of Ned's declaration that he would tolerate no loungers, the office soon became a favorite gathering-place for the boys of the neighborhood; which fact contributed nothing to the speed or accuracy of the work. They made us a great deal of trouble at first, for few of them knew better than to take a type out of one box, examine it curiously, and throw it into another; or lift a page of type that had just been set up, "to see how heavy it was," and let it drop into a mass of pi. They got over this after a while, but they never did quite get over the habit of discussing all sorts of questions in a loud voice; and sometimes, when we happened to be setting type, and were interested in what they were talking about, fragments of the conversation would mingle in our minds with the copy before us, and the curious effect would horrify us in the proof.