04

“PAPER, SIR？”

1. I had taken my seat in the most comfortable corner of a railway carriage, when a newsboy appeared at the window with his usual cry of, “Paper, sir？” I handed him a penny, and got in return a copy of the morning paper which I usually read.

2. It was the time of a General Election , and all over the kingdom men were making speeches day after day about the government of the country. The papers were full of these speeches, and of the news of the elections that had already taken place. They were more than full, indeed; for I saw that the paper which I had bought contained four extra pages that morning.

3. This led me to consider how much I had got for my penny. Two sheets of eight pages each, and eight columns in each page—one hundred and twenty-eight columns! If printed in book form, each column would make about six pages; so I had got for my penny a book of seven hundred pages! The paper was good, too, though much cheaper than the paper we get in books. I suppose I could not have bought so much blank paper at any shop for a halfpenny, perhaps even for a penny. All the printing, then, had only cost me about a halfpenny, perhaps much less.

4. How, then, was it possible for my paper to be sold for a penny？ The secret is this: it is not those who buy the paper but those who advertise in it that make it pay. I found six full pages—forty-eight columns full of advertisements and notices of all sorts; and for printing every one of these notices the newspaper had charged from sixpence up to a good many shillings or pounds, according to the space it occupied.

5. I glanced at the summary of the news given in one column of the paper, and in ten minutes I knew all the most important events that had happened during the previous day, not only in my own country, but all over the world, —in Europe, America, India, China, and even far-off Australia

6. It seems as if we were in fairyland, and had the power of flying in a moment to any part of the earth bymerely wishing to be there. By means of our newspaper, we can take a peep into any of the score of meetings held last night, and hear what was said there; or we may witness a fierce battle in South Africa, or listen to the gossip about great men in the streets and cafés of Paris.

7. How many weeks and months of travel by land and sea our ancestors would have needed to learn as much as we do from our daily paper! By it we can see more of the world in half-an-hour than they could in half a life-time. How does this happen？ What has caused the change？ Chiefly two thing—the printing-press and the telegraph .

8. Here I was reminded that I had taken no ac- count of what must cost a great deal of money—the gathering together of all the news my paper contained. In every large town, both in England and in other countries, there are men who telegraph to London every day the news of what is going on.

9. Evening is a busy time in the office of a morning paper. Telegrams are pouring in from all over the world; reporters are busy writing out their short-hand notes of speeches at public meetings; the editors are writing “leaders, ” or articles discussing the great events of the day. All this has to be set up in type, letter by letter and word by word, by men called compositors. Did you ever think that every letter in your newspaper has been lifted up singly and put into its place？

10. After the letters are all set up in this way, a cast is taken from the page of type in a soft material, and bent round like a drum. When dry this becomes quite hard, and it is used as a mould into which melted metal is poured. When the metal hardens, it is exactly like the page of type, but all in one piece, so that letters cannot slip out of their places, and it is round like a drum instead of flat. These drums of metal are put into the printing-machine, ready to print the white paper.

11. If you saw a printing-machine at work, like the one in the picture, you could hardly tell how it acts, so rapidly does everything move. At one end is a huge roll of paper, all in one long web, like a broad white ribbon. As the paper passes between the rollers, it is printed on both sides. At the other end of the machine it comes out in the form of complete news-papers, each cut of and folded up, ready for my friend the newsboy. Some machines can print as many as twenty thousand papers in an hour.

WORD SPELLING

WORD EXERCISE

1. Make sentences containing telegraph as noun, verb, and adjective.

2. Give a list of words formed from comfort, with meanings.

3. Give a list of words with the prefi x re-（like reminded）, with their meanings.