nder green eye-shades, sat isolated in a
tiny world of sharpened pencils, paste pots, shears, and emitted sudden
embittered oaths.

Editors from other departments, naively excited over items of vast
indifference to their nervous listeners, came and went.

An occasional printer, face and forearms smeared with ink, sauntered in
as if on a vacation, uttering some technical announcement and
precipitating a brief panic.

Toward the center of the room, seated at desks jammed against one
another in defiance of all convenience, telegraph editors, their hands
fumbling cables and despatches from twenty ends of the earth, bellowed
items of interest into the air--assassinations in China, probes,
quizzes, scandals, accusations in far-away places. They varied their
bellows with occasional shrieks of mysterious significance--usually a
misplaced paste pot, a borrowed shears, a vanished copy-boy.

These folk and a sprinkling of apparently unemployed and undisturbed
strangers spread themselves through the shop. Outside the opened windows
in the rear of the room, the elevated trains stuffed with men and women
roared into a station and squealed out again. In the streets below, the
traffic raised an ear-splitting medley of sound which nobody heard.

Against this eternal and internal disorder, a strange pottering,
apparently formless and without beginning or end, was guiding the latest
confusions and intrigues of the human tangle into perfunctory groups of
words called stories. A curious ritual--the scene, spreading through the
four floors of the grimy building with a thousand men and women
shrieking, hammering, cursing, writing, squeezing and juggling the
monotonous convulsions of life into a scribble of words. Out of the
cacophonies of the place issued, sausage fashion, a half-million papers
daily, holding up from hour to hour to the city the blurred mirrors of
the newspaper columns alive with the almost humorous images of an
unending calamity.

"The press," Erik Dorn once remarked, "is a blind old cat yowling on a
treadmill."

It was a quarter to nine when Dorn arrived at his desk. He seated
himself with a complete unconsciousness of the scene. A litter of
correspondence, propaganda, telegrams, and contributions from Constant
Reader lay stuffed into the corners and pigeonholes of his desk. He sat
for a moment thinking of his wife. Call her up ... spend the evening
downtown ... some unusual evidence of affection ... the vaudeville