ship ? No such thing ; a painted board
tells you it is the " Top-mast of a Frigate of
the fourth class." It does not strike you with
more wonder than disappointment — a sort of
displeasure at the inability to arrive at the
end of greatness. But there now ! — there
is a wooden ponderosity which at last brings
you to the close of your search. It resembles
a huge hogshead painted white, hooped with
broad and thick iron hoops painted white
also, and then a second hogshead, and a third,
and — but the thing is so fat and fore-
shortened that you cannot see beyond. This,
then, must be the main-mast of a first-rate
line-of-battle ship — a ship of a hundred-and-
twenty guns no doubt. Wrong again : " Fore-
mast of a Frigate of the second class." We
give it up.

These masts — and of course the main-masts
yet more elaborately — are built up as
regularly as a monument or wooden tower; but
let us pass on to something more within one's
range, for these masts, being no longer
traceable to their early origin, in a bit of
stick set up in sealing-wax by tiny little
fingers, may be said to have passed beyond
the bounds of ordinary human sympathy, and
to belong to the higher orders of naval
architecture.

The " rolling mills " of our English dockyards
often present scenes, when in full work,
which might rival Pandemonium. Great
furnaces suddenly displayed, by the raising of an
iron door or portcullis, wherein you see the
contending flames wavering, and leaping up
and down, and napping about, and thrusting
forth their tongues, and struggling to come
out and devour those nearest at hand.
Presently two dusky Cyclopean forms advance to
the glaring aperture with enormous iron tongs,
such as you only see here, and in a very grand
Christmas pantomime, and drag forth a great
square cake of red-hot copper, spitting and
spirting metallic sparks and flakes as it is
drawn along the iron flooring towards a pair
of great smooth rollers of solid iron, and of
many tons weight, placed one above the other,
with an interval of a couple of inches between.
To this interval one side of the red-hot cake
is presented, and though it is perhaps three
inches thick, it is drawn in by the revolving
motion of the rollers and forced through, having
been flattened and expanded by their great
weight and pressure in the process. It is
received by tongs and nippers on the other
side, passed over the top of the rollers, which
are then, by the turn of a screw, brought a
little closer together, when the operation of
pressing through the cake of copper between
them is repeated, to its still greater expansion;
and tins is repeated till, from a red-hot cake
of three inches thick by fifteen inches square,
it becomes a sheet of copper of the sixteenth
of an inch thick, and perhaps four or five feet
long. By this time the sheet of copper has
become of a dingy colour, like a thunderous
cloud; but it is immersed in a tank of liquid,
and after being turned over several times, it
is drawn out cool, and of the usual red colour
of our wrought copper. At another set of
rollers a similar operation is taking place for
the manufacture of copper bolts. For this
purpose the rollers are grooved in circles, like
deeply-indented rings, the grooves being of
different shapes or different rolls, according
as square bars or round bars are required.
A red-hot piece of copper, about a foot and a
half in length, and four inches square in thickness,
is drawn from a furnace, and being dragged
to the rollers, is passed through the largest of
the grooved rings, then over the rollers and
in again at the second groove, which is a size
less than the first, and so on, each ring having
a smaller groove, till it stops at the size
required for the bolt ; meanwhile, the heavy
ingot of copper, of a foot and a half in length,
has grown and grown, and crept through the
latter grooves, like a long writhing serpent
of red-hot metal, till finally it becomes a bar
of eighteen or twenty feet in length, ready to
be cut up into bolts when required.

But the power that sets in motion all
these rolling-mills, and upright dancing saws,
and circular spinning saws, and runs away
with tall tree-trunks at the end of a rope,
and bores holes in thick masses of cold iron,
and cuts brass like cheese, or shaves a surface
of it with far more ease and softness than
most razors shave a beard—where is this
power? Behold him yonder! There he is in
his house — the black and oily Majesty of
Steam power.

I approach his dingy, vibrating, ominous
house, and look through his small, square,
smutty, open window. There he is, all black
and shiny, ponderously heaving and sliding up
and down, and bowing like Pluto, and ducking
under, and curtseying with coy retirement,
and twirling iron dumb-bells in the air, as if
in triumph, and panting, and gasping, and
blowing and snorting, and puffing and working
incessantly, and whistling and drinking, and
smoking! Truly, a most wonderful fellow—
a great savage king, or, rather, one of the
savage Pagods, civilised into reason and
utility.

The purpose and result of all these materials,
appliances, and means, and powers, is to
be seen beneath each of those enormous light-
coloured roofings, like Brobdignag bonnets,
full of square glass windows. Beneath each
of these is embedded a stupendous fabric of
shapely oak planks and beams, united together
with copper bolts, and massive wooden
pins, as big as truncheons, and iron-work, and
glue as hard as stone. It sweeps downwards
into a deep cradle of beams below, and its
wooden walls sweep upward to a towering
altitude. The object is one which does a
strong man good to contemplate. It is an
immense satisfaction. It is the complete
realisation of a great — idea a whole, compact,
useful, majestic, and entire thing. But a
contemplation of the subordinate parts, has given