‘Oh! not so long,’ smiled the precocious lad, with a superior and patronising air; ‘only nine minutes. But look; you may try it for yourself. Have you a bit of paper? Ah! here’s a bit on the floor. Now mark that with any word you please, and let me dab it on here, and we’ll see how long before it comes out at the other end.’ ‘Well, let me see,’ said I, taking out my pencil; ‘come, I’ll mark it with your name.’ Bidding me take out my watch, Cupid adroitly dropped the inscribed slip on an exposed part of the incipient mass. Instantly my eye marked the second-hand on my dial-plate. Slowly I followed the slip, inch by inch; sometimes pausing for full half a minute as it disappeared beneath inscrutable groups of the lower cylinders, but only gradually to emerge again; and so, on, and on, and on--inch by inch; now in open sight, sliding along like a freckle on the quivering sheet; and then again wholly vanished; and so, on, and on, and on--inch by inch; all the time the main sheet growing more and more to final firmness--when, suddenly, I saw a sort of paper-fall, not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped; and down dropped an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap, with my ‘Cupid’ half faded out of it, and still moist and warm. My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine. ‘Well, how long was it?’ said Cupid. ‘Nine minutes to a second,’ replied I, watch in hand. ‘I told you so.’ For a moment a curious emotion filled me, not wholly unlike that which one might experience at the fulfilment of some mysterious prophecy. But how absurd, thought I again; the thing is a mere machine, the essence of which is unvarying punctuality and precision. Previously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now directed to a sad-looking woman standing by. ‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end here. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’ ‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last week. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts, and she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’ ‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t you turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’ ‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and royal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn out foolscap most.’