Queed ascended to the next floor, a noisy, discordant floor, full of metal tables on castors, and long stone-topped tables not on castors, and Mergenthaler machines, and slanting desk-like structures holding fonts of type. Rough board partitions rose here and there; over everything hung the deadly scent of acids from the engravers' room. "That's him now," said an ink-smeared lad, and nodded toward a tall, gangling, mustachioed fellow in a black felt hat who had just come up the stairs. Queed marched straight for the little cubbyhole where the proof-readers and copy-holders sweated through their long nights. "You are Mr. Pat, head proof-reader of the _Post_?" "That's me, sor," said Mr. Pat, and he turned with rather a sharp glance at the other's tone. "What excuse have you to offer for making my article ridiculous and me a common butt?" "An' who the divil may you be, please?" "I am Mr. Queed, special editorial writer for this paper. Look at this." He handed over the folded _Post_, with the typographical enormity heavily underscored in blue. "What do you mean by falsifying my language and putting into my mouth an absurd observation about the most loathsome of vermin?" Mr. Pat was at once chagrined and incensed. He happened, further, to be in most sensitive vein as regards little oversights in his department. His professional pride was tortured with the recollection that, only three days before, he had permitted the _Post_ to refer to old Major Lamar as "that immortal veterinary," and upon the _Post's_ seeking to retrieve itself the next day, at the Major's insistent demand, he had fallen into another error. The hateful words had come out as "immoral veteran." "Now look here!" said he, "there's nothing to be gained talking that way. Ye've got me--I'll give ye that! But what do ye expect?--eighty columns of type a night and niver a little harmless slip--?" "You must be taught to make no slips with my articles. I'm going to punish you for that--" "What-a-at! Say that agin!" "Stand out here--I am going to give you a good thrashing. I shall whip ..." Another man would have laughed heartily and told the young man to trot away while the trotting was good. He was nearly half a foot shorter than Mr. Pat, and his face advertised his unmartial customs. But Mr. Pat had the swift fierce passions of his race; and it became to him an unendurable thing to be thus bearded by a little spectacled person in his own den. He saw red; and out shot his good right arm. The little Doctor proved a good sailer, but bad at making a landing. His course was arched, smooth, and graceful, but when he stopped, he did it so bluntly that men working two stories below looked up to ask each other who was dead. Typesetters left their machines and hurried up, fearing that here was a case for ambulance or undertaker. But they saw the fallen editor pick himself up, with a face of stupefied wonder, and immediately start back toward the angry proof-reader.