Mouser had apparently found it beyond belief that so beautiful a bird
should not be toothsome in any single part. But the discoverer of this
sacrilege was not horrified as he would have been a year before. He had
even the breadth of mind to feel an honest sympathy for poor Mouser, who
had come upon arsenic where it could not by any known law of Nature have
been apprehended, and who for two days remained beneath the woodshed
sick unto death, and was not his old self for weeks thereafter. Wilbur
was growing up.

Soon after this the other notable event transpired. Frank, the dog,
became the proud but worried mother of five puppies, all multicoloured
like himself. It is these ordeals that mature the soul, and it was an
older Wilbur who went again to the _Advance_ office to learn the loose
trade, as his father had written him from New Orleans that he must be
sure to do. He had increased his knowledge of convention in the use of
capital letters, and that summer, as a day's work, he set up a column of
leaded long primer which won him the difficult praise of Sam Pickering.
Sam wrote a notice of the performance and printed it in the
_Advance_--the budding craftsman feeling a double glow when he sat this
up, too. The item predicted that Wilbur Cowan, son of our fellow
townsman, Dave Cowan, would soon become one of the swiftest of
compositors.

This summer he not only inked the forms on Wednesday, but he was
permitted to operate the job press. You stood before this and turned a
large wheel at the left to start it, after which you kept it going with
one foot on a treadle. Then rhythmically the press opened wide its maw
and you took out the printed card or small bill and put in another
before the jaws closed down. It was especially thrilling, because if you
should keep your hand in there until the jaws closed you wouldn't have
it any longer.

But there was disquieting news about the loose trade he intended to
follow. A new printer brought this. He was the second since the deaf one
of the year before, the latter on an hour's notice having taken the
six-fifty-eight for Florida one night in early winter--like one of the
idle rich, Sam Pickering said. The new printer, a sour, bald one of
middle age, reported bitterly that hand composition was getting to be no
good nowadays; you had to learn the linotype, a machine that was taking
the bread out of the mouths of honest typesetters. He had beheld one of
these heinous mechanisms operat