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.
Invitations are sent out for an inspection of the composing-room of the _Chicago Herald_, now newly equipped throughout with Hamilton labor-saving furniture. You attend. Compositors are sticking type for the next edition. A little later the _Herald_ places on display its first web press. This showing is in a ground-floor room, a step or two down from the street, next door to the Chicago Opera House, where Kiralphry’s _Black Crook_ is now playing and Eddie Foy is putting audiences in “stitches.” The press is a single unit standing in a shallow pit surrounded by a brass rail.
Comes now the winter. It is a Saturday. You are at the home of your boss. He has invited you to spend the afternoon learning how to paint. His easel is set up in the basement dining room. He is talking to you about religion, gravely concerned at learning that you sometimes attend the Universalist church. He believes you to be a heathen and suggests that you become converted and join a fundamentalist church--says that as long as you remain outside the fold and thus are not a Christian he cannot be interested in helping you become an artist.
The dear man! He wants so much to save your soul. Meanwhile, his good wife is laying the table for their evening meal. Her smile is motherly. Maybe she has guessed you were counting the plates. Pleasant odors come from the kitchen. Our gracious host brings your coat, helps you put it on, hands you your hat, opens the door and you step out into a Chicago snowstorm.
At this point the script calls for slow music and heart-rending sobs--another Kate Claxton in the _Two Orphans_. Also for melodrama! This is a beautiful snowstorm. The evening is mild and the flakes are big. They sail lazily through the amber light of the street lamps, feather the bare branches of trees that print a fantastic pattern against the red-brick housefronts. The drifts must be at least an inch deep. And tomorrow ... tomorrow, you will, as always happens on Sunday, go to a restaurant on Clark Street where you will be served two pork tenderloins, flanked by a mound of mashed potatoes topped with gravy, and one other vegetable, and supplemented by bread and butter and a cup of coffee--all for twenty cents. Joy bells ringing!