My life among these grave, elderly men and women would probably have been a sad one but for one fact. Adjoining my grandfather's residence was a small printing office, which he had established some years before for the benefit of a widowed daughter-in-law. A door opened from the house into the printing office, and through it I would steal whenever I got the chance. It was not only that the journeyman printer (there _were_ journeymen in those days) was the kindest of men, whose memory I cherish with affection to this hour, and who never failed to welcome me with a smile and a pleasant word when I invaded his domain. The place had a charm of its own for me, mysterious, inexplicable, but absolutely enthralling. The cases of type, the presses, the ink-rollers, the damp proof-sheets--chiefly of bills announcing public meetings or the "roup" of some bankrupt farmer's stock--filled me with wonder and delight. Child as I was, I saw in these humble implements of the petty tradesman the means by which one mind can place itself in contact with many. It is not to be supposed that I had even the dimmest perception of anything beyond the most obvious features of the printer's business, but the seed was sown then which was to fructify throughout my whole remaining life, and from the day when I first felt the fascination of that humble printer's workshop, I never ceased to regard myself as in a special degree a child of the printing-press. How delightful were the hours which I and David, the journeyman aforesaid, spent together when business was slack--and it was often slack! Then it was that together we would compose the most wonderful announcements of the great enterprises to which I was to commit myself in after life. Now it was the prospectus of a "genteel academy" of which I was to be the principal, and again it was the announcement of the opening of a vast emporium for the sale of goods of every description under my direction, that we thus composed and printed. These advertisements were invariably printed on gilt-edged paper in the bluest of ink, and, when I subsequently returned home, excited prodigious envy in my elder brother, who had never been privileged to "see himself in print."