their heads in exactly the same way, and
doing exactly the same thing with their limbs.
Nothing in the shape of clothing was made
for an individual; everything was contracted
for, by the million. The children of Israel
were established in Chatham, as salesmen,
outfitters, tailors, old clothesmen, army and navy
accoutrement makers, bill discounters, and
general despoilers of the Christian world, in
tribes, rather than in families. The cannon,
and pyramidal piles of cannon-balls, renounced
the insignificance of individuality, and
combined by the score. In the town-barracks, if I
saw one soldier pipe-claying a belt, I was sure
to see twenty: nineteen of whom might have
been compound reflections of the first one in
a combination of looking-glasses. No man
cooked his dinner in a saucepan; the whole
regiment's dinner came out of a copper. The
muskets stood in racks, and even the drums
were gregarious. Up in the airy Artillery Barracks,
Private Jones or Brown lived in a
mansion labelled "120 men," or " 160 men,"
— that was his door-plate—he had no separate
existence. The only fact that made the least
approach to the recognition of an individual
was a sentry box; but that, after all, was for
the accommodation of all the rank and file in
the barracks, as their turns came.

I took a walk upon the Lines, and mused
among the fortifications; grassy and innocent
enough on the surface, at present, but tough
subjects at the core. Here I saw the
artfullest pits and drawbridges, the slyest
batteries, the most unexpected angles and
turnings; the loneliest, deep-set, beetle-browed
little windows, down among the stinging-
nettles at the bottoms of trenches,
indicative of subterranean passages and bomb-
proof rooms. Here, I saw forts, and citadels,
and great-guns hiding their muzzles deceitfully
behind mounds of earth; and the low flat
tops of inner buildings crouching out of the
range of telescopes and aim of shells; and
mysterious gateways and archways, honey-combed
with loopholes for small arms; and tokens of
undermined communication between place and
place; and narrow passages beset by dark
vaults with gratings to fire through, that one
would like to see the inside of, they are so
mysterious, and smell so chill and earthy.
Steeped in these mysteries, I wandered round
the trenches of Fort Pitt, and away to Fort
Clarence—a dismal military prison now, like
an old Giant's Castle " new-hatched to the woeful
time;" — and looking down upon the river
from the sloping bank, I saw even there, upon
the shore, a stranded little fort, with its blank,
weather-beaten brick face staring at the mud;
which fort, I settled in my own mind, somehow
communicated with all the other
forts, and had unknown means of blowing
them up into the air if need should be. Then,
I went back to the Lines, and strolled away to
the low stagnant level of the river in that
direction, by other solitary trenches, forts,
drawbridges, and posts of guard. Every where,
I found some fragments of a comprehensive
engineering scheme for cutting off, cutting
down, blowing up, alluring on to his own
destruction, or driving back to his defeat,
" the enemy"— all these contrivances having
reference to men by the hundred, and the
thousand, and the ten thousand, without the
least offence to any individual.

I was now in a good train of mind for the
Dockyard; a Dockyard being a place that
always particularly impresses me with the
feeling I have mentioned, on account of the
multiplicity of obtrusive single parts it
comprehends, and of which, indeed, it is composed.

Take this Chatham " Yard " — take Woolwich
—take Portsmouth— take Plymouth—
each with many features in common, and some
features very different — what wonderful places,
they all are! The results accomplished in
their substantial magnitude and completeness
are scarcely more surprising and admirable
than the means by which they have been
realised — commencing with the "'dreamy
abstraction" of a variety of mathematical
calculations, progressing through a multiplicity of
operations upon solid materials, and ending in
a stupendous ship, ready to be launched, like
a wooden citadel, as it is, into the proud but
yielding bosom of the ocean.

What could I, an individual, do in aid of
such a result? Look at this huge tree-trunk,
lying along a stone wharf at Chatham Dockyard,
in company with several other trunks
almost as large. It is of such a diameter, and
so tough of grain, that I could not make much
way through it with a saw in a couple of
hours, if not obliged to stop long before, from
the pressure against the sides of the
embedded implement. As to the weight of such
a tree-trunk, it would assuredly need two or
three horses to drag it a dozen yards. But
see! — a strong rope is flung round one end
of it — the rope leads up towards an aperture
in a brick house, or work-place, over which is
written " Saw-Mills " — and away runs the
huge tree-trunk, following the rope up hill
with unhesitating docility. It is placed in
front of the fierce-looking teeth of three great
saws, all standing bolt upright, hungry but
passive; a workman makes a sign to them
(by touching a handle), and the three fierce
saws instantly commence a dance. It is a grim
and grotesque pas de trois to their own hoarse
music of a smothered scream, and the " drum"
accompaniment of buzzing wheels which have
set them in motion. The saws advance from
one end of the trunk, and two of them,
dancing three inches apart, cut a solid plank
of this thickness out of the solid centre of the
trunk, while the third saw, performing its
dance at ten or twelve inches distance from
its sisters, cuts out a solid beam from the
solid trunk — and all this with the ease, not
exactly of a Taglioni, but with the same
amount of facility and rapidity which
characterise a sailor's hornpipe.

In another department of these mills, called