a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you
his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story
alphabet.

The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the
elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster.
In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy
before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another,
bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.

Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send
down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.

Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run
up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.

One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building
without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a
long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled
the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that
was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi
on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they
have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is
called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.

When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9
extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have
to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to
find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use
body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid