Oswald Bastable and Others

This happened a very little time after we left our humble home in Lewisham, and went to live at the Blackheath house of our Indian uncle, which was replete with every modern convenience, and had a big garden and a great many greenhouses. We had had a lot of jolly Christmas presents, and one of them was Dickys from father, and it was a printing-press. Not one of the eighteenpenny kind that never come off, but a real tip-topper, that you could have printed a whole newspaper out of if you could have been clever enough to make up all the stuff there is in newspapers. I dont know how people can do it. Its all about different things, but it is all just the same too. But the author is sorry to find he is not telling things from the beginning, as he has been taught. The printing-press really doesnt come into the story till quite a long way on. So it is no use your wondering what it was that we did print[Pg 2] with the printing-press. It was not a newspaper, anyway, and it wasnt my young brothers poetry, though he and the girls did do an awful lot of that. It was something much more far-reaching, as you will see if you wait.