An hour must have elapsed before I felt that I dare venture to go towards Mr Grimstone's glass case, and I was about desperately to tell him that I was ignorant and helpless, and quite unfit to do what he had set me, when the dark, stern-eyed man I had seen on the previous day came round by where I stood. He gazed at me curiously, and gave me a nod, and was passing on, when I desperately exclaimed: "If you please, sir--" "Eh? What, is it, my boy?" he said. "I was told, sir, to dis this pie," I said, fearful that I was making some absurd blunder about the word _pie_. "Well, why don't you do it? Get the sponge off the stone and give it a good soaking in a galley." "I'm very sorry, sir," I said, encouraged by his quiet, kind way, "but I don't know how." "Haven't you been in a printing-office before?" "No, sir." "And never distributed type?" "No, sir." "How absurd! Who set you to do it?" "Mr Grimstone, sir." "But does he know that you have never handled type?" "Yes, sir." "Ass?" he muttered. "Here, come along with me, my man. No; better not, perhaps. Leave that packet alone, my boy. There, lay it down. Stand here and try and learn the case." "Learn the case, sir?" I said, with my heart sinking within me at being given another impossible task. "Yes, it's very easy; only wants time," he said kindly; "Here, pick up one of these pieces of type," he continued, dexterously taking up a little thin bit of black metal, "like this, and turn it in your fingers, and see what letter is stamped on the end, and then put it back in the same compartment of the case." "Is that tray the case, sir?" "Yes, quite right, go on. You can come and ask me anything you don't know." I darted a grateful look at him, and eagerly began my task, though in fear and trembling, lest Mr Grimstone should come and find fault because I had not "dis'd the pie." Few people, I think, realise the sufferings of a sensitive boy at school, or at his first launching into life, when set to some task beyond his perception or powers. The dread of being considered stupid; the fear of the task-masters, the strangeness, the uncongenial surroundings, all combine to make up a state of mental torture that produces illness; and yet it is often ridiculed, and the sufferer treated with cruelty for non-performance of that which, simple to the initiated, is to him in his ignorance an utter impossibility. It was with a sense of relief I cannot describe that I began to lift the metal types one by one, looked at them, and put them back; and I was not long in finding out that, while the capital letters in the upper of the two trays before me ran nearly regularly A, B, C, D, and so on, and beneath them the figures 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, the lower case was a perfect puzzle.