Telegrams wer 1 on Friday last from Carton by friends here of Lin Hsid-hsun, the Empress Dowazer's ex-secret emissary to Japan, now alo known to fame as the persecater of Mr. Kin or Lien-shan, the Reformer, at Macao, to the effect that just as Lia was stepping Government jetty from the newly-arrived Mac+o steamer some one amongst the hundreds of people on the jetty fired a revolver at him hitting him in the abdomen. It was further stated that the friends of the man who fited the shot adopted the novel way of throwing Mexican dollars into the crowd in order to facilitate his escape from arrest. The equence was that the crowd natwally t to work to scramble for the dollars ther than face the risk of receiv. ing the bullets which the desperadoes would have been ready to shower upon anyone attempting to block their accomplice's escape. The result was that no arrests were male, whilst it is further stated that up to the sending of the telegram the bullet had not been extracted." As already stated in previous issues of this paper with reference to Lis he was anything—but the people of Canton on account fraudulent - manipulation of the Weising Lottery monopoly which he held several In order to facilitate the production of the paper and the insertion of late news the "North-China Daily News" has installed Linotype composing machines, thus, so far as the setting-up of the paper is concerned, adopting the system of the leading papers of England and Americ A short account. of these ingenious machines may be of interest to readers, for they represent a very high degree of ventive and constructive skill.
Until within comparatively recent years the printer, or compositor, was content to set up type in the same manner as Caxton, although every other stage in the art had been entirely changed. After Jaboriously building up the page, letter by letter, when it had gone through the press he spent more time in deliberately destroying what had cost so much exertion, and in putting the type back into the cases ready for future use. To obviate this useless drudgery and save time many inventive inds were applied from time to time to the problem.—Ingenions type-setting machines were constructed, but they did not come into general use, and newspapers and books continued to be printed from the old-fashioned movable type. But a few years ago the Linotype machine' was per-Fected, and by its means now nearly every paper of importance in the English language is set-up, or composed, while it is extensively used for other langrage:
To see the compositers at work upon these machines in the " North-China Daily News" office is very interesting. The Linotype—aptly described by the "En gineer" as the most remarkable machine of the century—seems to do everything but think in its work, tuming out the solid "lines 0? type "—henee its name—with the most astonishing rapidity and regularity The operator sits in front of a keyboard, resembling that of a typewriter, and as he taps the keys brass matrices with the required letter cut in them fall from the magazine and are assembled in line. Be-teen each word he puts a space by means of one of the keys, and when the line is full—indicated by' a_ bell—he touches a handle and the line of matrices is carried automatically in front of the mouth-piece of a pot filled with metal kept fluid by means of a gas burner. The metal is ejected against the line of matrices, making a line of cast type, and in less time
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.