From hurried scribbler to pale compositor, and behold, the news is bawled all over London! Such work as this goes on for ever around the church of St. Dunstan. Scribblers come and scribblers go; compositors come to their work young and hopeful, they leave it bent and poisoned, yet the work goes on. Each day the pace grows quicker, each day some new means of rapid propagation is discovered, and each day life becomes harder to live. One morning, perhaps, a scribbler is absent from his post--“Brain-fever, complete rest; a wreck.” For years his writings have been read by thousands daily. A new man takes the vacant chair--he has been waiting more or less impatiently for this--and the thousands are none the wiser. One night the head compositor presses his black hand to his sunken chest, and staggers home. “And time too--he's had his turn,” mutters the second compositor as he thinks of the extra five shillings a week. No doubt he is right. Every dog his day. Nearly opposite to the church stands a tall narrow house of dirty red brick, and it is with this house that we have to do. At seven o'clock, one evening some years ago--when heads now grey were brown, when eyes now dim were bright--the Strand was in its usual state of turmoil. Carriage followed carriage. Seedy clerks hustled past portly merchants--not their own masters, _bien entendu_, but those of other seedy clerks. Carriages and foot-passengers were alike going westward. All were leaving behind them the day and the busy city--some after a few hours devoted to the perusal of _Times_ and _Gazette_; others fagged and weary from a long day of dusty books. Ah! those were prosperous days in the City. Days when men of but a few years' standing rolled out to Clapham or Highgate behind a pair of horses. Days when books were often represented by a bank-book and a roughly-kept day-book. What need to keep mighty ledgers when profits are great and returns quick in their returning? As the pedestrians made their way along the narrow pavement some of them glanced at the door of the tall red-brick house and read the inscription on a brass plate screwed thereon. This consisted of two mystic words: _The Beacon_. There was, however, in reality, no mystery about it. The _Beacon_ was a newspaper, published weekly, and the clock of St. Dunstan's striking seven told the end of another week. The publishing day was past; another week with its work and pleasure was to be faced. From early morning until six o'clock in the evening this narrow doorway and passage had been crowded by a heaving, swearing, laughing mass of more or less dilapidated humanity interested in the retail sale of newspapers. At six o'clock Ephraim Bander, a retired constable, now on the staff of the _Beacon_, had taken his station at the door, in order to greet would-be purchasers with the laconic and discouraging words: “Sold hout!”