n those days. Leather ink-balls were still used
in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand
on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was
placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble,
literally deserved its name of "impression-stone." Modern machinery
has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press
which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for
the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten,
that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it
plays a part in this chronicle of great small things.

Sechard had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a "bear" in
compositors' slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the pressman
from ink-table to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt suggested
the nickname. The "bears," however, make matters even by calling the
compositors monkeys, on account of the nimble industry displayed by
those gentlemen in picking out the type from the hundred and fifty-two
compartments of the cases.

In the disastrous year 1793, Sechard, being fifty years old and a
married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the bulk of
French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only hand left
in the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the "gaffer")
died, leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed to be on
the verge of extinction; for the solitary "bear" was quite incapable
of the feat of transformation into a "monkey," and in his quality of
pressman had never learned to read or write. Just then, however, a
Representative of the People being in a mighty hurry to publish the
Decrees of the Convention, bestowed a master printer's license on
Sechard, and requisitioned the establishment. Citizen Sechard accepted
the dangerous patent, bought the business of his master's widow with
his wife's savings, and took over the plant at half its value. But he
was not even at the beginning. He was bound to print the Decrees of
the Republic without mistakes and without delay.

In this strait Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had the luck to discover a noble
Marseillais who had no mind to emigrate and lose his lands, nor yet to
show himself openly and lose his head, and consequently was fain to
earn a living by some lawful industry. A bargain was struck. M. le
Comte de Maucombe, dis