“Sometime, if you care to come back,” states Mr. Robinson, in a letter which must have been written immediately after your departure, “and if you will remain half an hour later in the evening and sweep out, and come in a half hour earlier in the morning and dust, Rand McNally will pay you three dollars a week.” [Illustration] SECOND SOJOURN IN CHICAGO A few months later, when you have just turned into your eighteenth year and have saved sixty dollars, three twenty-dollar gold pieces, it is time to return to Chicago. You tell Mr. Newett. He wishes you well and says that if you care to remain with _Iron Ore_ he will take you into partnership when you are twenty. This is a big temptation. You admire and like your boss. He is a grand person--your idol. Saying goodbye involves a wrench. You are now back with R-M staying half an hour at night and getting to work a half hour earlier in the morning and all is well with the world. At the time of your first visit to Chicago, line photo-engraving was not even a whisper, and halftones were not even dreams. On your second visit, pen drawings are beginning to receive direct reproduction. Folding machines are unknown; and in a large loft, at long tables, dozens upon dozens of girls are hand-folding railroad timetables. This loft is on a level with the designing department. Between the two there is a brick wall through which, about two feet up from the floor, has been cut an opening in which there is a heavy, tin-covered sliding door. When you take 14 × 22 metal plates down to the foundry to be routed--by someone else, for you don’t like machines--you pass through this loft, between the girl-adorned tables. You, in turn, are adorned with the side-whiskers known as mutton-chops--trying to look older than your years. Also, in accord with the custom of the times, you wear tight-fitting pants. One day, in returning from the foundry with a metal plate on your shoulder, you pull back the sliding door and when you lift one leg to step through the opening the pants rip where the cloth is tightest. On another occasion when again carrying a plate on your shoulder your jacket pocket catches on a key at the end of a paper-cutter shaft and the shoddy that had once proved so disastrous in your pants now probably averts a serious accident. Web presses and automatic feeders are also absent. In the basement at Rand McNally’s there is a battery of drum-cylinders printing James S. Kirk “American Family Soap” wrappers. The stock is thin, red-glazed paper, and the sheets a double 24 × 36, or perhaps even larger. You marvel at the skill with which boys do the feeding; but even greater is your wonder at the hand-jogging and cutting of these slippery and flimsy sheets.