have been a respectable "smiddy" in a country village. They stood
as close to each other as the space would allow,--so close that their
showers of sparks intermingled, and kept the whole shed more or less in
the condition of a chronic eruption of fireworks. To Bob's young mind
it conveyed the idea of a perpetual keeping of the Queen's birthday. To
his mother it was suggestive of singed garments and sudden loss of
sight. The poor woman was much distressed in this department at first,
but when she found, after five minutes or so, that her garments were
unscathed, and her sight still unimpaired, she became reconciled to it.

In this place of busy vulcans--each of whom was the beau-ideal of "the
village blacksmith," all the _smaller_ work of the railway was done. As
a specimen of this smaller work, Will Garvie drew Mrs Marrot's
attention to the fact that two vulcans were engaged in twisting red-hot
iron bolts an inch and a half thick into the form of hooks with as much
apparent ease as if they had been hair-pins. These, he said, were hooks
for couplings, the hooks by which railway carriages were attached
together, and on the strength and unyielding rigidity of which the lives
of hundreds of travellers might depend.

The bending of them was accomplished by means of a powerful lever. It
would be an endless business to detail all that was done in this
workshop. Every piece of comparatively small iron-work used in the
construction of railway engines, carriages, vans, and trucks, from a
door-hinge to a coupling-chain, was forged in that smithy. Passing
onward, they came to a workshop where iron castings of all kinds were
being made; cylinders, fire-boxes, etcetera,--and a savage-looking place
it was, with numerous holes and pits of various shapes and depths in the
black earthy floor, which were the moulds ready, or in preparation, for
the reception of the molten metal. Still farther on they passed through
a workroom where every species of brass-work was being made. And here
Bob Marrot was amazed to find that the workmen turned brass on
turning-lathes with as much facility as if it had been wood. Some of
the pieces of brazen mechanism were very beautiful and delicate--
especially one piece, a stop-cock for letting water into a boiler, the
various and complex parts of which, when contrasted with the huge
workmanship of the other departments, resembled fine watch-work.

As they passed on, Bob observed a particularly s