Here are the quotations for the coming week (May
30th to June 5th):
1. …Here, under the guidance of the inky apprentice, he had learned to find
his way more or less circuitously about the case, and considered himself an
expert compositor.
The…paper in its locked formes lay on a stone-topped
table, a proof by the side…With a mallet and a pair of tweezers, he knocked out
mysterious wedges of wood that released the forme, picked a letter here and
inserted a letter there, reading as he went along and stopping much to chuckle
over his own contributions…
2. Keller was insolent with joy. He was going to cable from Southampton to
the New York World, mail his account to America on the same day, paralyse
London with his three columns of loosely knitted headlines, and generally efface
the earth. 'You'll see how I work a big scoop when I get it', he said.
'Is
this your first visit to England ?' I asked.
'Yes', said he…
3.
...It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there,
while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and
the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called
for water…There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension,
but, as the clock hands crept up to three o'clock, and the machines swung their
flywheels two or three times to see that all was in order before I said the word
that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud…
The sources of last week's extracts (May 23rd to
29th), as several readers have pointed out, are as follows:
1. (...Morning brought the penetrating
chill of the Northern December, the layers of woodsmoke ... and all the smell of
the white Northern plains …) This is from "William the Conqueror" in
The Day's Work.
2. (...The green growths in the sides
of the ravines burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead
stuff... ) This is from "How Fear Came" in the Second Jungle
Book.
3. (…It was a pitchy black night, as
stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the
westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees...) This is from "The Man
who would be King", in Wee Willie Winkie.
Good wishes to all, John R
PS Just to note that in the NRG we
have recently put up John McGivering's notes on "The
Phantom Rickshaw", Fred Lerner's article on RK as Science Fiction writer, a
further instalment of Gillian Sheehan's epic on RK and medicine, this time on
"Neurological Conditions", and notes on "With Drake in the Tropics" by Peter
Keating. Notes by Roberta Baldi on two further Departmental Ditties and by Johh
McG. on "My Own True Ghost Story" will follow as soon as I have a moment to
format them.
