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cast iron…’
    ‘One of my improvements,’ said the old man, interrupting his son’s reading.
    ‘With all their appurtenances: ink-troughs, balls andbenches, etc. Sixteen hundred francs!… Why, father,’ said David, letting the inventory fall, ‘your presses are just old lumber, not worth three hundred francs. All they’re fit for is firewood.’
    ‘Old lumber, are they?…’ Séchard senior exclaimed, ‘Old lumber! Take the inventory and come downstairs! You’ll see whether the new-fangled ironmongery they make nowadays works like these good, well-tried tools. And then you’ll be ashamed to cry down honest presses which roll along like the mail-coaches and will go on running the rest of your life without needing the slightest repair. Old lumber! Yes, but good enough to keep your pot boiling! Old lumber which your father has been handling for twenty years and which helped him to make you just what you are!’
    The old man clattered down the rugged, worn, rickety staircase without tumbling over himself, opened the alley door leading to the workshop, rushed to the first of his presses which he had been crafty enough to have oiled and cleaned, and pointed to the strong oaken side-pieces which his apprentices had polished.
    ‘Isn’t that a jewel of a press?’ he asked. There was a wedding-invitation on it. The old ‘bear’ lowered the frisket on to the tympan and the tympan on to the carriage and rolled it under the press; he pulled the bar, unrolled the cord to draw back the carriage, and raised tympan and frisket with all the agility a young ‘bear’ might have shown. Thus handled, the press gave a pretty little squeak like that of a bird fluttering away after striking against a window-pane.
    ‘Is there a single English press that can do such quick work?’ said the father to his astonished son.
    The old man ran to the second and third presses in succession and performed the same operation on each of them with equal adroitness. The last one revealed to his wine-blurred gaze a spot which his apprentice had overlooked: with a resounding oath the drunkard gave it a rub with his coat-tail, like a horse-coper smoothing the hide of a horse he wants to sell.
    ‘With these presses, and without a foreman, you can earnyourself nine thousand francs a year, David. As your future partner, I am against your replacing them by those accursed iron presses which wear out the type. You went into raptures in Paris over the invention of that damned Englishman, an enemy of France, trying to make a fortune for the type-founders. Oh yes! You wanted Stanhope presses! To hell with your Stanhope presses. They cost two thousand five hundred francs apiece, almost twice as much as my three beauties put together, and wear down the type because there’s no give in them. I’m not educated like you, but bear this in mind: Stanhope presses may last longer, but they spell ruin for the type. My three presses will give you good service, the work will be pulled clean, and that’s all the people in Angoulême will ask for. Print with iron or wood, gold or silver, they won’t pay you a farthing more.’
    ‘Item
,’ said David. ‘Five thousand pounds of type from the Vaflard foundry…’ The pupil of the Didots could not repress a smile on reading this name.
    ‘All right, laugh away! After a dozen years, the characters are as good as new. There’s a type-founder for you! Monsieur Vaflard is an honest man who turns out hard-wearing material; and in my opinion the best founder is the one you go to least often.’
    ‘Valued at ten thousand francs,’ David continued. ‘Ten thousand francs, father! But that works out at forty sous a pound, and Messrs Didot only charge thirty-six sous a pound for their new pica. Your old batter is only worth the metal it’s cast in – ten sous a pound.’
    ‘So you call it better, do you? Bastard, italic and round type made by Monsieur Gillé, formerly printer to the Emperor: type worth six francs a