who had to bore holes with niggling centrebits,
and to rivet them together with noisy
hammers; and who took a longer time to
turn out the tip of an arrow or a kitchen
boiler, than their powerful progency require to
twist a score of gun-barrels, or to complete a
locomotive engine.

"Take care! the forge hammer is not
quite obsolete." I should have known this
to my cost if a stalwart arm had not dragged
me out of the swing of a double-handed
hammer then being wielded by a flesh and
blood blacksmith, to form rods for
rivet-bolts.  In watching the motions of this man,
the impression that the mechanical arts do
not promote the picturesque or help to
inspire the artist, was forcibly revived. The
graceful elasticity of his motions was a
delightful contrast to the hard, undeviating
routine of his automaton shopmates. The
highest models of Grecian art, were not more
graceful than the unconscious attitudes of
this smith, while swinging his hammer over
his head to bring it tremendously down upon
the glowing metal. Rooting his feet apart
upon the ground while stooping to raise
the hammer, and drawing them together
when swinging it to deliver the blow, every
limb fell, in its turn, into harmony with the
rest of the figure, and expressed muscular
strength and elasticity to perfection. I once
saw even greater elegance of motion
displayed in connection with boiler plates.  It
was in Lancashire, where they made them in
an enormous smithy surrounded by furnaces,
with an overpowering steam-hammer
standing in the midst.  The men, having drawn
out a big, shapeless lump of metal white hot
from the fire, and having dragged it along the
sheet-iron floor to the hammer, they escaped
the myriads of sparks which flew out during
the pounding process, by holding their leather
aprons at one corner, up to their faces, and
turning elegant pirouettes, to present their
backs as targets for the showers of shooting
sparks. Nothing at the opera could be more
graceful. Then—when they dragged the
still red mass to the rolling mills, through
which it was to be passed, from wider to
narrower, until pressed into such plates as I
had just seen sewn together by the iron
stitchers- every attitude of the men, swaying
their bodies back to receive the red-hot sheet
from one roller and to return it through
another, was an admirable picture of power
and grace.

The grotesque, the diablerie, of iron-working,
is practised in the Lambeth Marsh
casting-shop on the first-floor: an enormous
apartment, roofed chiefly with skylights, and
floored with sand and mould, very like the
carpet trod by the horses at the Royal
Equestrian Amphitheatre close by. Underneath a
part of it, are the loam and masonry of
which the form of the article to be cast is
made; and, into which, the molten metal is
now being poured from a prodigious lipped
basin. This form, besides earth, sand, and
bricks, is composed of hay, dung, and other
combustibles; which, when the molten metal
is run into it, generates a gas that would
inevitably blow the mould and the men
through the roof, if it had no vent. Tubes,
therefore, convey it to the surface, where it is
lighted; burning in strong, blue, unearthly
jets that dim the other lights, and cast a
diabolical hue upon the faces of the Mulcibers,
upon the file of travelling cranes which support
the cauldron, by which it is passed from
the cylindrical melting furnaces, and, if
needed, from one end of the shop to the
other. Bright and lively sparks fly off
from the mouth of the mould as it drinks
in the white liquid fire, with a force
and profusion that no display of fireworks
could surpass. The whole scene is so grim
and hot, and pandemoniacal, that a stranger,
suddenly coming on it from the outer
world, could hardly help inquiring, like Macbeth,
of the intelligent, dark, perspiring artisans
energetically puddling down the molten
metal at various openings of the mould-

Ye black and midnight hags! What is't ye.do?

The answer to that question would
certainly be, "casting a ten-ton steam cylinder
for one of her Majesty's marine engines;"
or, if the flaming cauldron gave forth a more
ghastly illumination of green, and yellow,
and purple, with gaseous exhalations hotter,
drier, and more suffocating, the answer would
be, "Running eleven tons of brass into the
form of a screw propeller." Whereupon
Macbeth would fall—after the manner of his
countrymen—into an arithmetical reverie, and
reckon that eleven tons of brass at a shilling-
a-pound comes to nearly twelve hundred
pounds sterling, for material alone; and then,
indulging in a playful application of the rule
of three, he would compute that if the screw
propeller costs the nation twelve hundred
pounds, the entire cost of a pair of marine
engines with extras and accessories would be
from thirty-five to forty thousand pounds;
and he would be right. Whence he would
infer the origin of the term " putting on the
screw," in reference to the imposition of the
righteous double income tax; from which,
indirectly, the Lambeth- Marsh Mulcibers
derive their profits, and the auxiliary Cyclops
their wages.

It is vain to hint that attention is
exhausted and limbs are tired.  Before a notion
can be formed of how the Volcano's engines
were constructed, acres of smiths'-shop,
turning-shop, planing-shop, finishing-shop, and
fitting-shop, have yet to be inspected; even if
more acres of model-shop up stairs
(where carpenters make wooden models to be cast from,
of the smaller parts of the steam-engine) are to
be shirked. More automata hugging tremendous
cranks in staunch embraces; cutting
them to fit hair's-breadths; polishing them
to rival mirrors; worming pillars of iron.