Page:Dick Hamilton's Fortune.djvu/89

Rh ; how they sat down at typewriters and rattled it off; how it was corrected and edited; sent to the composing room in pneumatic tubes; set up on type-setting machines that seemed almost human; the type put into "forms" or strong steel frames; how a soft sheet of wet paper was pressed on the type and baked by steam until it took every impression and was the exact counterpart of a printed page.

The boys watched and saw that these baked sheets of paper, called "matrices," were sent to the stereotyping room, where, bent into a half-circle in a machine, they were filled with hot melted lead, which, hardening, took every impression of the cardboard.

Then the curved metal plates, each one representing a page of the paper, were clamped on a big press, that worked with a noise like thunder, and, in an instant, it seemed, white paper from a big roll, which was fed it at one end, came out printed, pasted, and folded newspapers at the other end of the machine.

A grimy boy gathered up an armful of them, as they kept piling up at the foot of a chute, which extended somewhere up inside the press. Mr. Newton, who had escorted Dick and his friends about, took up one of the journals.

"There you are!" he shouted, above the rumble and roar of the press, as he handed Dick a paper.

The wealthy youth unfolded it. On the front page was the story of himself and "Colonel