are of this
crisis.

Perhaps on one of those blinking orbs people with a proper concern for
other world events would be saying to one another: "Yes, he's grown up
now. Didn't you hear the big news? Why, to-morrow he's going to begin
driving a truck for Trimble Cushman--got a job for the whole summer."

If the announcement startled less than great news should, the speaker
could surely produce a sensation by adding: "The first automobile truck
in Newbern Center."

And how had this immature being, capable out-of-doors boy though he was,
come to be so exalted above his fellows? Sam Pickering's linotype had
first revealed his gift for machinery. For Sam had installed a linotype,
and Wilbur Cowan had patiently mastered its distracting intricacies.
Dave Cowan had informally reappeared one day, still attired with
decreasing elegance below the waist--his cloth-topped shoes but little
more than distressing memories--and announced that he was now an able
operator of this wondrous machine; and the harried editor of the
_Advance_, stung to enterprise by flitting wastrels who tarried at his
case only long enough to learn the name of the next town, had sought
relief in machinery, even if it did take bread from the mouths of honest
typesetters. Their lack of preference as to where they earned there
bread, their insouciant flights from town to town without notice, had
made Sam brutal. He had ceased to care whether they had bread or not. So
Dave for a summer had brought him surcease from help worries.

The cynical journeyman printer of the moment, on a day when Dave tried
out the new machine, had stood by and said she might set type but she
certainly couldn't justify it, because it took a human to do that, and
how would a paper look with unevenly ending lines? When Dave, seated
before the thing, proved that she uncannily could justify the lines of
type before casting them in metal, the dismayed printer had shuddered at
the mystery of it.

Dave Cowan seized the moment to point out to his admiring son and other
bystanders that it was all the working of evolution. If you couldn't
change when your environment demanded it Nature scrapped you. Hand
compositors would have to learn to set type by machinery or go down in
the struggle for existence. Survival of the fittest--that was it. The
doubting printer was not there to profit by this lecture. Though it was
but five o'clock, he was down on the depot platform moodily waiting for
the six-f