Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/209



the eyes of Kuba, whose nickname was ‘Spattered Kuba,’ a strip of paper, about two yards in width, was madly careering down with a speed which the chance onlooker would have found it difficult to estimate. It unwound itself from an immensely fat spool, which was so heavy that it took the full strength of two workmen to lever it into the position where it turned; this spooled the strip into the unwieldy, polished printing machine, which first of all directed it into a narrow reservoir where it was moistened by a scarcely perceptible vapour; then it was squeezed between two cylinders, one of which was smooth, while the other was covered with a surface of cast metal consisting of thousands of letters, so that one turn of the cylinders printed eight pages of a newspaper. The interminable strip flew on to a second pair of cylinders which supplied it with another eight pages on the reverse side, $193$