While these comments were still proceeding the noise of the press suddenly ceased. The silence was terrible to Seth’s guilty consciousness, for he had heard enough to know that it was his fault. Mr. Workman entered the room again, and again Sam-boye’s deep voice was heard, repeating the awful Sinclair-Lincoln error. Seth had looked at his fresh copy of the _Chronicle_, with some vague hope that the Editor was mistaken, but alas! it was too true. Mr. Workman came over to his stall; he had put his watch back in his pocket, but his countenance was stern and unbending. “You are Mr. Fairchild, I presume,” he said. Seth rose to his feet, blushing, and murmured, “Yes, sir.” “I understood from your brother that you were used to newspaper work.” “Well, I thought I was. I have been around the _Banner of Liberty_ office a great deal, but it seems so different on a daily.” “H’m,--yes. Well, I dare say you’ll learn.” Luckily the press started up again here, and Mr. Workman, looking at his watch once more, went down stairs. Seth felt most grievously depressed. Looking back, his first day had been full of mortification and failure. The use of scissors and mucilage brush was painfully unfamiliar to his clumsy fingers. The scope and intention of the various news departments he had been told to take charge of were unknown to him, and he had watched Murtagh go over the matter he submitted, striking out page after page, saying curtly, “We’ve had this,” “This is only worth a line or two,” or “this belongs in county notes,” with a sinking heart. His duties were so mechanical and commonplace, after what he had conceived an editor’s functions to be, that his ineptitude was doubly humiliating. Then there was this dreadful proof-reading failure. Murtagh had given him the sample proof-sheet in the back of the dictionary to copy his marks from--and he had copied them with such scrupulous efforts after exactness that the printers couldn’t understand them. These printers--he could see them through the windows opposite, standing pensively over their tall cases, and moving their right arms between the frames and their sticks with the monotonous regularity of an engine’s piston-rod--seemed a very sarcastic and disagreeable body of men, to judge by the messages of criticism on his system of marking which the inky boy had delivered for them with such fidelity and enjoyment during the day. He had eaten nothing since the early breakfast, and felt faint and tired. The rain outside, beating dismally on the window and the tin roof beyond, added to his gloom, and the ceaseless drumming of the presses below increased his headache. The other men seemed to have nothing to do now save to talk, but he turned wearily to the great mound of exchanges from which Murtagh had directed him to extract “Society Jottings” and “Art, Music and the Drama” after the paper went to press.