great variety and extent of manufacturing establishments as any equal space in the district. Here are the celebrated Brades Works, which have already been noticed at some length. Not far from them are the Bromford Works, of the Messrs. Dawes, perhaps equally celebrated for the production of the best kind of bar iron. Indeed they may be regarded as a representative establishment for the district; and I visited them one day with peculiar interest. When in full operation, with their sixty puddling furnaces in action, they present a scene which would have stirred the muse of Homer or Virgil beyond any of their vivid fancies. Puddles! mud puddles! what rustic. Saxon similes are applied to these fierce operations! To an outsider looking into one of those sixty furnaces, and seeing, if his eyes would bear it, the boiling, bubbling mass of metal, ten times more than red hot, a puddle would sound too wet and watery to describe it. The puddlers who fish in the troubled fountain, are generally stripped to the waist, and flooded with perspiration. They fish out a mass at the end of the rod, of a weight which shows what athletes they are trained to be. I hardly know what figure to use to convey an idea of the appearance and consistency of this burning, frittering fizzy mass of metal thus brought out of the furnace. Should one dip a large sponge into
