e
groomsman added a line or two from one of the poets, where the bard
speaks of the bliss of the marriage state, 'when _heart_ meets _heart_
reciprocally soft.' The wicked boys in the printing office, however,
corrected the poet, making the stanza read thus:

'When _head_ meets _head_, reciprocally soft.'

Another instance, more ludicrous still, was the following: A lad in a
printing office, who knew more about type setting than he did of the
Greek mythology, in looking over a poem they were printing, came upon
the name of _Hecate_, one of the lady divinities of the lower world,
occurring in a line like this:

'Shall reign the _Hecate_ of the deepest hell.'

The boy, thinking he had discovered an error, ran to the master printer,
and inquired eagerly whether there was an _e_ in cat. 'Why, no, you
blockhead,' was the reply. Away went the boy to the press room, and
extracted the objectionable letter. But fancy the horror of both poet
and publisher, when the poem appeared with the line:

'Shall reign the HE CAT of the deepest hell.'

But let a form of types, arranged either for book or newspaper, be ever
so correct when sent to the press, errors not unfrequently happen from
yet another cause, viz.: the liability of now and then a letter to drop
out, when the form has not been properly adjusted, or locked
sufficiently tight in the iron frame which by printers is called a
_chase_. How important the loss of a single letter may become is seen by
the following example. A printer putting to press a form of the Common
Prayer, the _c_ in the following passage dropped out unperceived by him:
'We shall all be CHANGED in the twinkling of an eye.' When the book
appeared, to the horror of the devout worshipper, the passage read: 'We
shall all be HANGED in the twinkling of an eye.'

Sometimes a whole page or a whole form drops through, and falls into
what printers call _pi_--that is, a mass of all sorts of letters, stops,
marks, points, spaces, forming a jumble of everything--and involving the
dire necessity of assorting over the whole mass, letter by letter. In
isolated printing houses, where they have but few workmen, and
assistance is not near, such a catastrophe is a serious matter. An
instance of this kind, which happened many years ago in the county of
Oneida, is in point. An editor was putting his paper to press (for in
the country, editor and printer are often combined) when down fell his
form--a wreck of matter