Edwin sidled towards the centre of interest, the new machine, which,
however, was not a new machine. Darius Clayhanger did not buy more new
things than he could help. His delight was to `pick up' articles that
were supposed to be `as good as new'; occasionally he would even assert
that an object bought second-hand was `better than new,' because it had
been `broken in,' as if it were a horse. Nevertheless, the latest
machine was, for a printing machine, nearly new: its age was four years
only. It was a Demy Columbian Press, similar in conception and movement
to the historic `old machine' that had been through the Reform
agitation; but how much lighter, how much handier, how much more
ingenious and precise in the detail of its working! A beautiful
edifice, as it stood there, gazed on admiringly by the expert eyes of
Darius, in his shirt-sleeves, Big James, in his royally flowing apron,
and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices
outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a
day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office,
and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to be equal to
anything.
The machine appeared so majestic there, so solid and immovable, that it
might ever have existed where it then was. Who could credit that, less
than a fortnight earlier, it had stood equally majestic, solid, and
immovable in Manchester? There remained nothing to show how the miracle
had been accomplished, except a bandage of ropes round the lower pillars
and some pulley-tackle hanging from one of the transverse beams exactly
overhead. The situation of the machine in the workshop had been fixed
partly by that beam above and partly by the run of the beams that
supported the floor. The stout roof-beam enabled the artificers to
handle the great masses by means of the tackle; and as for the
floor-beams, Darius had so far listened to warnings as to take them into
account.
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