ose
up, and you notice that the machine is slowly moving backward and
forward, and still more slowly at the same time in a lateral direction.
Some curious piece of mechanism is placed on it, and the movements of
the machine cause a sharp steel-cutter to pass over the iron surface,
which cuts it as easily and truly as a joiner planes a piece of fir. The
side motion brings all the surface gradually under the instrument, but
the machine, clever and powerful though it is, requires to be constantly
watched and regulated, and hence the fixed attention of the man in
charge. At a large machine, you will see those long, curious rods called
"eccentrics" undergoing this operation; at another, a cylinder is being
planed; and at a third, the rims of wheels are being cut. The filings
thus made are preserved, and will be seen in large heaps in a yard,
ready to be melted down, and "used up" again. In some cases both iron
and brass filings are produced, which, of course, are mixed with each
other; but in a quiet corner of one of the sheds you will find a boy
with a heap of these filings before him, separating the brass from the
iron by means of a magnet. Only imagine a boy of fourteen or fifteen
doing nothing all day long except raking a magnet through a heap of
black and yellow dust, and brushing into a separate heap the iron
filings off his magnet! You will also see a series of three iron rollers
working on each other, by means of which plate iron can be twisted into
any given form; a mighty "punch" which will make a hole an inch in
diameter through iron an inch in thickness as easily as though it were
clay; and a sharp-cutting instrument that shears through sheets of iron
as easily as a pair of scissors through a sheet of paper.

Go into another shed, and you will see all these various parts getting
their last touches from the hand, and being fitted into each other; and
here, also you find two or three men engraving, on circular segments of
brass, the names the various engines are to be known by. In another shed
the engines are being "erected." Here you see from twenty to thirty in
all stages of progress. Perhaps the framework only has been laid; or
the boiler, with its many rows of long, circular brass tubes, has just
been fastened, and is now receiving its outer clothing of long slips of
wood; or the whole is complete, merely wanting to be tried on the many
lines of rail in and around the sheds. There are two classes of engines
her