Shutting himself up in his own room, seeing no one, rarely crossing the threshold, allowing himself hardly any repose, he set himself to work out the plan he had formed. With a knife and some pieces of wood he constructed a set of movable types, on one face of each of which a letter of the alphabet was carved in relief, and which were strung together, in the order of words and sentences, upon a piece of wire. By means of these he succeeded in producing upon parchment a very satisfactory impression. To be out of the way of prying eyes, he took up his quarters in the ruins of the old monastery of St. Arbogaste, outside the town, which had long been abandoned by the monks to the rats and beggars of the neighbourhood; and the better to mask his designs, as well as to procure the funds necessary for his experiments, he set up as a sort of artificer in jewellery and metal-work, setting and polishing precious stones, and preparing Venetian glass for mirrors, which he afterwards mounted in frames of metal and carved wood. These avowed labours he openly practised, along with a couple of assistants, in a public part of the monastery; but in the depths of the cloisters, in a dark secluded spot, he fitted up a little cell as the _atelier_ of his secret operations; and there, secured by bolts and bars, and a thick oaken door, against the intrusion of any one who might penetrate so far into the interior of the ruins, he applied himself to his great work. He quickly perceived, as a man of his inventiveness was sure to perceive, the superiority of letters of metal over those of wood. He invented various coloured inks, at once oily and dry, for printing with; brushes and rollers for transferring the ink to the face of the types; "forms," or cases, for keeping together the types arranged in pages; and a press for bringing the inked types and the paper in contact. [Illustration: GUTENBERG IN THE OLD MONASTERY. Page 22.]