ved from disaster that
once! But he had not quite vowed. And, in any case, a vow to oneself
is not a vow to the Virgin. He had escaped from a danger, and the
recurrence of the particular danger was impossible. Why then commit
follies of prudence, when the existing arrangement of things `would do'?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

That afternoon Darius Clayhanger, with his most mysterious air of
business, told Edwin to follow him into the shop. Several hours of
miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his
compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once
more plumb and ready for action. For considerably over a week Edwin had
been on his father's general staff without any definite task or
occupation having been assigned to him. His father had been too
excitedly preoccupied with the arrival and erection of the machine to
bestow due thought upon the activities proper to Edwin in the complex
dailiness of the business. Now he meant at any rate to begin to put the
boy into a suitable niche. The boy had deserved at least that.

At the desk he opened before him the daily and weekly newspaper-book,
and explained its system.

"Let's take the `British Mechanic,'" he said.

And he turned to the page where the title `British Mechanic' was written
in red ink. Underneath that title were written the names and addresses
of fifteen subscribers to the paper. To the right of the names were
thirteen columns, representing a quarter of the year. With his
customary laboriousness, Darius described the entire process of
distribution. The parcel of papers arrived and was counted, and the
name of a subscriber scribbled in an abbreviated form on each copy.
Some copies had to be delivered by the errand boy; these were handed to
the errand boy, and a tick made against each subscriber in the column
for the week: other copies were called for by the subscriber, and as
each of these was taken away, similarly a tick had to be made against
the name of its subscriber. Some copies were paid for in cash in the
shop, some were paid in cash to the office boy, some were paid for
monthly, some were paid for quarterly, and some, as Darius said grimly,
were never paid for at all. No matter what the method of paying, when a
copy was paid for, or thirteen copies were paid for, a crossing tick had
to be made in the book for each copy. Thus, for a single q