As my eyes fell before the awful glare of his, he laughed. ‘You have read your answer, I see,’ he said. ‘And now, listen. Seat yourself upon the parapet exactly where you now stand; observe as closely as you please what I am about to do; but stir one step to hinder it, and as I live, I will hurl you below!’
The threat, I knew, was no vain one; the man who uttered it overtopped me by the head and shoulders, and possessed double my strength. Resistance, therefore, would have been entirely useless; and trembling in every limb, I obeyed the command, and seated myself. And this was what I then beheld. Approaching the mass of machinery against which rested the wooden box or car wherein we had ascended, Mr Hesketh leaned over the edge of the chimney, and deliberately lifted this up from one of the two strong iron hooks upon which it hung suspended. Then slipping the loosened chain over the pulley, he sent it clattering towards the ground below. A horrified shout from the men who stood by the windlass greeted this act, coming up hoarse and discordant from the distance; and bending forwards I answered that shout with an imploring cry for aid—a wild vain cry! The men, of course, could not help me; and with sickening despair I watched them retreating to the subterranean passage, to save themselves from danger—as mounted now upon the projecting machinery, Mr Hesketh loosened the remaining hook of the car and precipitated it into the abyss beneath.
[MISPRINTS.]
Misprints, errors of the press, printers’ blunders, typographical mistakes—call them what we may—are so numerous that every reader meets with them occasionally. Budgets of ludicrous examples are now and then given in the popular journals; and these budgets might be greatly extended. Our Journal gave its quota more than thirty years ago; and the matter was again touched upon in the volume for 1872.
Many errors consist in the omission of a single letter in a single word, altering the sense most materially. Thus, an omission of the letter t, in a work by Dr Watts, made immortal into immoral; and other grotesque instances of this kind of error could be given. The heedless substitution of one letter for another, without exceeding or falling short of the proper number of letters in the word, is a very frequent form of blunder. ‘Bring him to look’ is a poor version of ‘bring him to book.’ A candidate at an election certainly did not mean, as a newspaper implied, that he fully expected to come in ‘at the top of the pole.’ A compositor, perhaps a learner, being unable to make out a Greek word of three letters, set them down as the three numerals to which they bore some resemblance in shape, namely 185. At a public demonstration the mob rent the air with their snouts. Dr Livingstone’s cap, as worn when Mr Stanley met him in the heart of Africa, was said in one of the papers to have been ‘famished with a gold-lace band.’ In old English printing, the syllable con was often contracted to something like the shape of the figure 9; and this numeral is to be found in many books, even standard works, where it has no right whatever; in one edition of the Monasticon Anglicanum for instance, the word conquest is represented as 9quest. There are both a wrong letter used and a letter omitted in the startling statement, that a right reverend prelate was highly pleased with some ecclesiastical iniquities shewn to him.
A useful question has been asked, and to some extent discussed, whether several of the above-cited misprints of single letters, or others similar to them, may not be due to the arrangement of the compositor’s working apparatus? Mr Keightley suggested, a few years ago, that possibly some of the varied readings of passages in Shakspeare might be due to the compositor dipping his fingers into the wrong cell, and others to the fact that wrong types have got into the right cell. Most persons who have visited any of the printing establishments are aware that the compositor’s types are placed in flat cases provided with a number of small cells or receptacles, each for one particular letter of one particular class of type. There are two cases, one called the upper and the other the lower; the former being for the capitals, the latter for the small letters. Both cases are placed before the compositor, inclining upwards from front to back, the upper more inclined than the lower. The cells are not ranged in regular alphabetical order, but in such manner that those containing the letters most wanted shall be grouped together near the compositor’s hand, leaving such letters as j, k, q, x, z, &c. to occupy cells near the margin of the case. May not some types fall out of an overfilled cell into the one just below it; or may not the filling of a pair of cases with new type be so carelessly managed that a few fall over into the wrong cells; or may the compositor, in distributing the type after printing, now and then drop a type into a wrong cell?
A practical printer will answer such a question in the affirmative. The letters b and l, for instance, being in contiguous cells, one may fall or slip down into the cell belonging to the other, which might be the cause of ‘bring him to book’ being changed into ‘bring him to look.’ The old form of type for the double letter st is believed to have led to many misprints—such as nostrils being expressed stostrils, in a Bible printed in the early part of the present century. Whether the types were arranged in the cases a hundred or two hundred years ago in the same order and manner as at present, might be worth a little investigation—in so far as any change of arrangement may have rendered either more or less frequent such misprints as would arise from the falling over of some of the types into wrong cells. There are now something like a hundred and fifty cells in a pair of cases for ordinary book and newspaper printing; even if there were the same number in former times, it does not necessarily follow that the arrangement of the rank and file would be the same.
Benjamin Franklin, when a young man, refused to give ‘garnish’ or ‘pay his footing,’ on being placed in a room of compositors; because he had already responded to a demand for similar blackmail in another department of the printing-office. They took a peculiar method of punishing him, by disarranging some of the types in his cells when he was out of the room. Very likely this technical tribulation may have led him inadvertently to the committal of numerous misprints. Several years ago Mr H. Martin, of Halifax, adverted to a typographical error in a former communication of his to one of the journals, and added: ‘Upwards of thirty years’ experience in connection with the press has taught me to be very lenient towards misprints. The difficulty of detecting typographical errors is much greater than the uninitiated are inclined to believe. I have often observed that, even if the spelling be correct, a wrong word is very apt to remain undetected.’ He notices an instance in an edition of Shakspeare’s Merchant of Venice, where Portia’s lines—
Young Alcides when he did redeem