he made me carry them up to his room. So you see, gentlemen, I kent the grand secret, when it _was_ a secret.’” On William Tofts’ death in 1859 the following notice appeared in the _North Briton_: “Mr. Tofts was, in some respects, a remarkable man. He had been associated with the mechanical department of the printing trade for nearly half a century, and during that period had witnessed many eventful changes. When he first went, as a boy, to learn the pressman’s trade, the neat hand-presses now in use were not known, and printing by steam was not even dreamt of. The presses then in use were of cumbrous construction, and in place of rollers, the ink was distributed over the surface of the types by means of pads, with which the formes were dabbed over. The work of improvement had begun, however, and printing by means of hand-presses was shortly afterwards brought to the state of perfection in which we now find it. [Illustration: OLD WOODEN PRESS AT PAUL’S WORK Used by Ballantyne in Printing the Waverley Novels] “Mr. Tofts was engaged in the office of the Messrs. Ballantyne in the palmy days of the Waverley Novels, and printed off several of the impressions of that immortal series of fictions. He well remembered Sir Walter Scott, who made frequent visits to the office where Mr. Tofts, then a very young man, was engaged; and he had also vivid recollections of Jeffrey, Lockhart, Sydney Smith, and the other great guns of the _Edinburgh Review_. He was the first man who superintended a steam printing-machine in Scotland—it was, if we remember rightly, on the first introduction of one of these valuable aids to book-making in Messrs. Ballantyne’s establishment. He also had the distinction of inaugurating a steam machine for printing _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_.”