ed in a city office--by a slip of a girl
that wouldn't know how to hold a real stick in her hand--and things had
come to a pretty pass. It was an intricate machine, with thousands of
parts, far more than seemed at all necessary. If you weren't right about
machinery, and too old to learn new tricks, what were you going to do?
Get sent to the printer's home, that was all! The new printer drank
heavily to assuage his gloom, even to a degree that caused Herman
Vielhaber to decline his custom, so that he must lean the gloomy hours
away on the bar of Pegleg McCarron, where they didn't mind such things.
Sam Pickering warned him that if this kept on there would no longer be
jobs for hand compositors, even in country printing offices; that he,
for one, would probably solve his own labour problem by installing a
machine and running it himself. But the sad printer refused to be warned
and went from bad to worse.

Wilbur Cowan partook of this pessimism about the craft, and wondered if
his father had heard the news. If it had ceased to be important that a
bright boy should set up a column of long primer, leaded, in a day, he
might as well learn some other loose trade in which they couldn't invent
a machine to take the bread out of your mouth. It was that summer he
spent many forenoons on the steps of the ice wagon driven by his good
friend, Bill Bardin. Bill said you made good-enough money delivering
ice, and it was pleasant on a hot morning to rumble along the streets on
the back steps of the covered wagon, cooled by the great blocks of ice
still in its sawdust.

When they came to a house that took only twenty-five pounds Bill would
let him carry it in with the tongs--unless it was one where Bill, a
knightly person, chanced to sustain more or less social relations with
the bondmaid. And you could chip off pieces of ice to hold in your
mouth, or cool your bare feet in the cold wet sawdust; and you didn't
have to be anywhere at a certain hour, but could just loaf along, giving
people their ice when you happened to get there. He wondered, indeed, if
delivering ice were not as loose a trade as typesetting had been, and
whether his father would approve of it. It was pleasanter than sitting
in a dusty printing office, and the smells were less obtrusive. Also,
Bill Bardin went about bareheaded and clad above the waist only in a
sleeveless jersey that was tight across his broad chest and gave his big
arms free play. He chewed tobacco, too