or was open and one window gone, the smell
and heat in the office on that warm morning were notable. Old sheets of
the "Manchester Examiner" had been pinned over the skylight to keep out
the sun, but, as these were torn and rent, the sun was not kept out.
Nobody, however, seemed to suffer inconvenience. After the odours, the
remarkable feature of the place was the quantity of machinery on its
uneven floor. Timid employes had occasionally suggested to Darius that
the floor might yield one day and add themselves and all the machinery
to the baker's stores below; but Darius knew that floors never did
yield.

In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, whose
pipe ran straight upwards to the visible roof. The mighty cylinder
machine stood to the left hand. Behind was a small rough-and-ready
binding department with a guillotine cutting machine, a
cardboard-cutting machine, and a perforating machine, trifles by the
side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of metal
heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might have served to
illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating machine the Holy
Inquisition.

Then there was what was called in the office the `old machine,' a relic
of Clayhanger's predecessor, and at least eighty years old. It was one
of those machines whose worn physiognomies, full of character, show at
once that they have a history. In construction it carried solidity to
an absurd degree. Its pillars were like the piles of a pier. Once, in
a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of them, and a piece of
smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier could not do. The
machine at one period of its career had been enlarged, and the neat
seaming of the metal was an ecstasy to the eye of a good workman. Long
ago, it was known, this machine had printed a Reform newspaper at
Stockport. Now, after thus participating in the violent politics of an
age heroic and unhappy, it had been put to printing small posters of
auctions and tea-meetings. Its movement was double: first that of a
handle to bring the bed under the platen, and second, a lever pulled
over to make contact between the type and the paper. It still worked
perfectly. It was so solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it
could never get out of order nor wear away. And, indeed, the
conscientiousness and skill of artificers in the eighteenth century are
still, through that resistless