to be annealed after three or four blows. They were trying an experiment with the Bessemer steel, with the view of getting a smoother surface for large dinner covers, some of which would give honour, scope, and margin to the largest joint of roast beef ever cut from a prize ox in England. The steel is hard to work under the stamp and requires annealing frequently, but will probably yield a surface susceptible of higher polish when tinned than the common sheet-iron. The art department of the establishment is very interesting; and I had never conceived that so much highly-trained genius was employed in the ornamentation of these household articles. I was surprised to learn that the pictures in the lids of parlour coal vases were really painted one by one on canvas and in oils. Thus the lid of the vase is the frame of an oil painting under a glass cover. Here, too, as at Messrs. Walton's, could be seen in remarkable illustration what can be made of paper. Not only trays of every style and size, with a metal ring to them, but panels for railway carriages, which, in a collision, would make no splinters. They gave me a piece of half-inch paper board; and doubtless the joists and ceiling of a house might be made out of the same material. There are about 2,000 persons employed in the manufacture of tin and japan ware in the town and immediate neighbourhood. Since 1849 these in-
