He saw me coming, but, though I tapped softly at the door several times, he refused to take any notice of me for some minutes, during which I had to stand uncomfortably aware of the fact that I had given terrible offence to this man in authority, by allowing myself to be engaged downstairs after he had bade me go. He was busy, pen in hand, looking over some long, narrow pieces of paper, and kept on turning them over and over, making his spectacles flash as he changed his position, and directing the top of his very shiny bald head at me, till at last he raised it, gave a start, and turned as if astonished at seeing me there; but it was poor pantomime and badly done. "Well, what is it?" he said. "If you please, sir, Mr Lister sent me up to ask you to give me a job." "Me give you a job," he said, in a menacing tone; "why, I thought you would be hanger-on down below, and not come up into the office, where you'd get your nice white hands dirtied. What job can I give you? What can you do? What do you know? Here, Smith, take this boy, and give him a page of pie to dis." The big, fat-headed boy came up from a distant part of the room, scowled at me, and led me to one of the desk-like frames, upon which were four large open trays full of compartments of various sizes. "Here you are!" he said, "lay holt;" and he thrust a little heavy square paper packet into my hands. "It's burjoyce,"--so it sounded to me; "look alive, and then come for another." He went away, leaving me balancing the heavy packet in my hand. It was about the size and thickness of a small book, but what next to do with it, or how I was to do it, I, did not know. Of course I know now that it was the petty, contemptible revenge of a little-minded man to set me, a totally uninstructed novice, to do that which an old practised compositor will shelve if he can, as an uncongenial task. To "dis a page of burjoyce pie" was, in fact, to distribute--that is, place in its proper compartments, or in the case-- every large and small letter, space and point, of a quantity of _bourgeois_, or ordinary newspaper type, that had been accidentally mixed, or "pied" as it is technically termed. The distribution of an ordinary page or column of type is comparatively easy, for the skilled workman reads it off word by word, and drops the letters dexterously in the compartment assigned; but in "pie" the letters and spaces are all jumbled, and the task is troublesome and slow. There was I, then, with about as easy a task as if I had been suddenly handed the various parts of a watch, and told to put them together; and I felt helpless and ashamed, not daring to interrupt any of the busy men intent upon their work at the various frames.