"
From the news-room they went up to the composing room--a vast hall of
confusion, filled with strange-looking machines and half-dressed men and
boys. Some were hurrying about with galleys of type, with large metal
frames; some were wheeling tables here and there; scores of men and a few
women were seated at the machines. These responded to touches upon their
key-boards by going through uncanny internal agitations. Then out from a
mysterious somewhere would come a small thin strip of almost hot metal, the
width of a newspaper column and marked along one edge with letters printed
backwards.
Up through the floor of this room burst boxes filled with "copy." Boys
snatched the scrawled, ragged-looking sheets and tossed them upon a desk. A
man seated there cut them into little strips, hanging each strip upon a
hook. A line of men filed rapidly past these hooks, snatching each man a
single strip and darting away to a machine.
"It is getting late," said Howard. "The final rush for the first edition is
on. They are setting the last 'copy.'"
"But," Mrs. Carnarvon asked, "how do they ever get the different parts of
the different news-items together straight?"
"The man who is cutting copy there--don't you see him make little marks on
each piece? Those marks tell them just where their 'take,' as they call it,
belongs.
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