quotes_feb25_2007.htm

With a mallet and a set 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.

This is from “The Last Term” in Stalky & Co..

Beetle, Editor of the school paper, and fledgling journalist, is editing his work in the loft behind the printing office.

To these things are added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question; the eye of a horse-coper, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to all circumstances.

This is from th second chapter of The Light that Failed.

Dick Heldar, seeking to make his way as a war artist, is out in the Sudan during the Nile Expedition of 1884-5. He makes friends with Torpenhow, a journalist for the Central Southern Syndicate, who gets him accredited and makes him free of the fraternity of war correspondents, hard-bitten adaptable men.

Then came, in the intervals of steady card play, more personal histories of adventure and things seen and suffered; panics among white folk when the blind terror ran from man to man on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the people crushed each other to death they knew not why; fires, and faces that opened and shut horribly at red-hot window-frames; wrecks in frost and snow, reported from the sleet-sheathed rescue-tug at the risk of frost-bite…

This is from “A Matter of Fact” in Many Inventions. Three journalists, an American a Dutchman and an Englishman, on a ship bound for England, have witnessed the death of a great sea monster washed up from the deeps by an earthquake. But, once home, as the Englishman quickly realises, the story seems so sensational that it could not be taken seriously, except as fiction. The American reluctantly agrees.