Then he asked Jimmy how it happened, and Jimmy told us about it.
"I'm sorry you poured any of it in the cases," said Phaeton. "For, you see, the cases have a different letter in every box, and if you take a handful of type like that and pour it in at random, it makes considerable trouble."
"Oh, yes; I knew all that before," said Jimmy; "but when the form burst, and I saw the type all in a mess on the floor, I was so frightened I lost my head, and didn't know what I was about. I wish I could pay for it," he added, as he left the office.
"Don't let it trouble you," said Phaeton.
For a long time Jimmy did not come near us again, and as he had carried off the copy of his remaining poems, that enterprise came to an end—for the time being, at least.
There was no lack of other jobs, but we sometimes had a little trouble in collecting the bills. Small boys would keep coming to order visiting-cards by the hundred, with their name on them in ornamental letters,—boys who never used any visiting-card but a long, low whistle, and never had a cent of money except on Fourth of July. When Phaeton or I was there, they were given to understand that a pressure of other work compelled us to decline theirs with regret; but, if they found Ned alone, they generally persuaded him that they had good prospects of getting money from some source or other, and so went away with the cards in their pockets.
There was no lack of advice, either. The boys who lounged in the office were always proposing new schemes. The favorite one seemed to be the publication of a small paper, which some of them promised to write for, others to get advertisements for, and others to distribute. After the book of poems had come to an untimely end, Ned was fierce for going into the paper scheme; but Phaeton figured it up, declared we should have to do an immense amount of work for about a cent an hour, and put an effectual veto on the plan.
Charlie Garrison, who, while the other boys only lounged and gossiped, "learned the case," and quietly picked up a good deal of knowledge of the trade, intimated one day that he would like to be taken into the partnership.
"Yes," said Ned; "there's work enough here for another man; but you'd have to put in some capital, you know."
"Put in capitals wherever they belong, of course," said Charlie; "begin proper names and every line of poetry."