A Mr. Occshott controls Gamber's machine. Mr. Occshott in appearance and in tastes is much more like a cricket professional than Young Wriford's early ideas of an editor. Literary young men on Gamber's staff call Mr. Occshott a soulless ox and rave aloud against him, and being found worthless by him, are flung raving out of Gamber's machine, which he relentlessly drives. In Young Wriford, Mr. Occshott tells himself that he has found a real red-hot 'un, and for the ultimate benefit of Gamber's he puts the red-hot 'un through the machine at all its fiercest; sighs and groans at Young Wriford, and checks him here and checks him there, and badgers him and drives him all the time--slashes his manuscripts to pieces; comes down with contemptuous blue pencil and a cutting sneer whenever in them Young Wriford gets away from facts and tries a flight of fancy; hunts for missed errors through proofs that Young Wriford has read, and finds them and sends for Young Wriford, and asks if it is his eyesight or his education that is at fault, and if it is of the faintest use to hope that he can ever be trusted to pass a proof for himself; puts Young Wriford on to "making-up" pages of Gamber's illustrated periodicals for press, and pulls them all to pieces after they are done, and sends Young Wriford himself to face the infuriated printer and to suffer dismay and mortification in all his soul as he hears the printer say: "Well, that's the limit! Take my oath, that's the limit! 'Bout time, Mr. Wriford, you give my compliments to Mr. Occshott and tell him I wish to God Almighty he'd put any gentleman on to make up the pages except you. It's waste labour--it's sheer waste labour--doing anything you tell us. Take my oath it is." Young Wriford assures himself that he hates Mr. Occshott, but steadily learns, steadily benefits; finds that he really likes Mr. Occshott and is liked by him; steadily, ardently sticks to it--earns his reward. "Well, there it is," says Mr. Occshott one day, throwing aside the manuscript over which Young Wriford had taken infinite pains only to have it horribly mangled. "There it is. Have another shot at it, Wriford. And, by the way, you're not doing badly--not badly. You're awfully careless, you know, but I think you're picking it up. We're starting a new magazine, a kind of popular monthly review, and I'm going to put you in nominal charge of it--charge of the make-up and seeing to press and all that. And your salary--you've been here six months, haven't you? Three guineas, you're getting? Well, it'll be four now. Make a real effort with this new idea, Wriford. I'll tell you more about it to-morrow. A real effort--you really must, you know. Well, there it is." IV