expressed in
the form of badinage. There were so many young housekeepers that there
was much need of teachers. I tried to get the New England women to stop
feeding their families on dough--especially hot soda dough--and to
substitute well-baked bread as a steady article of diet. In trying to
wean them from cake, I told of a time when chaos reigned on earth, long
before the days of the mastodons, but even then, New England women were
up making cake, and would certainly be found at that business when the
last trump sounded. But they bore with my "crotchets" very patiently,
and even seemed to enjoy them.

CHAPTER XLIV.

PRINTERS.

The printer's case used to be one of the highways to editorial and
congressional honors; but the little fellows of the craft invented a
machine which goes over it like a "header" over a wheat-field and leaves
a dead level of stalks, all minus the heads, so that no tall fellows are
left to shame them by passing on from the "stick" to the tripod or
speaker's mallet. Their great Union rolling-pin flattens them all out
like pie-crust, and tramps are not overshadowed by the superiority of
industrious men. But the leveling process makes impassable mountains and
gorges in other walks of life--makes it necessary that a publisher with
one hundred readers must pay as much for type-setting as he with a
hundred thousand. The salary of editors and contributors may vary from
nothing to ten thousand a year; but through all mutations of this life,
the printer's wages must remain in _statu quo_. So the Union kills small
papers, prevents competition in the newspaper business, builds up
monster establishments, and keeps typos at the case forever and a day.

I knew when the _Visiter_ started that it could not live and pay for
type-setting the same price as paid by the New York _Tribune_, and the
day the office became mine, I stated that fact to the printers, who took
their hats and left. In '52, I had spent some part of every day for two
weeks in a composing room, and with the knowledge then acquired, I, in
'58 started the business of practical printer. I took a proof of my
first stick, and lo, it read from right to left. I distributed that, but
had to mark the stick that I might remember.

The first day I took two boys as apprentices. First, Wesley Miller, who
had spent two months in a Harrisburg office, and knew something of the
art, but did not like anything about it except working the press.
Second,