this department which are carried on so rapidly,
that you find yourself in contact with the raw
material and the completed article in the same
workshop. Thus, in the factory where the sabots
are made for the shells, you will kick against
half the trunk of a tree with the bark on at
one step, and the next will place you where the
completed trencher on which the shell is to rest
awaits your inspection. The manufacture of the
barrels in which the different stores are packed
for transport, is also carried on with extraordinary
speed. The staves cut out of the wood,
bent to the proper form, put together and
hooped, almost quicker than the eye can follow.
There was something especially agreeable to
your Eye-witness about this peculiar branch of
the work. He supposes that this must arise
from his convivial nature and happy associations
with barrels and what they contain. Alas, these
are destined to hold nothing more toothsome
than gunpowder, fuses, percussion-caps, and
cartridges; and although we should doubtless be
told by gentlemen of the teetotal persuasion
that these are infinitely less injurious than the
ordinary contents of barrels, the present writer
is yet of opinion that they are, on the whole, less
satisfactory.

Passing through a large and rough-covered
building where old iron is wrought again into
bars, your Eye-witness paused a moment to
notice of what various and inconsistent objects
this "old iron" was made up. Bolts and bars,
old cuirasses, ancient gun-barrels battered flat,
all mixed together. And sometimes you will
find among these heterogeneous gatherings of
metal to be made into cannon-balls many things
that speak of peace and rustic, homely life: so
that by the side of an old gun-lock that has
snapped away a hundred lives, you will see the
latch that has belonged to some cottage door—
a latch that children's fingers have often pressed,
and round which the tendrils of the clematis
above the door have trifled in the summer
wind.

But there is no time here for thought. We
are entering a place barred across to keep out
intruders. It is the smiths' workshop where the
shells are cast, and is vast and black and dark as
such places are. It is barred across to keep
people out, because these smiths who cast the
shells are such indifferent, careless sort of fellows,
that they will run against you, if you don't take
care, and splash your legs with drippings of
the red-hot liquid iron which they carry
about in caldrons in all directions. Wild, reckless
chaps, who glare at you with eyes that
show the brighter for their begrimed faces.
Fellows always grand, indifferent, and picturesque
in their actions as smiths always are,
and careless!—why, there is a lad walking about
the workshop and using an iron crowbar some
six feet long as a walking-stick, apparently
not the least affected by the fact that one end of
it is bright red-hot.

Bright red-hot, too, is the liquid iron which,
in the casting of the shells, pours out of the
furnaces into the moulds, looking, as the stream
descends in the darkness of the smithy, like a
sheet of molten gold. It splashes over as it
falls, and each splash, as it drops to the ground,
flashes in an uncertain radiation like a star that
is seen through tears. This is even a finer sight
than the white-hot blocks of iron seen just before,
which it almost blinded one to look at, and which
seemed to scorch one's eyelashes away as one
stood at a distance watching them. The shells cast
in this place are rolled along a sort of wooden
trough which runs all over the department and
by which they reach other workshops, where
they go through the processes of cleansing,
drilling, and bushing, and are finally conveyed,
when finished, to the wharf.

There is, in one part of the enclosed space
belonging to the Arsenal at Woolwich, a place set
apart by itself, and separated entirely from the
rest of the works, which immediately strikes one
as wearing an aspect of its own. Surrounded by
water, divided from the rest of the Arsenal by a
canal communicating with the Thames, there is
here a marked quietness and hush which is very
different from the other portion of the Great
Laboratory, but especially from that just described,
where the rattle of the machinery and the clang
of the hammer cease not for a single moment.
Here, too, are trees and verdure, the workshops
very small and with large spaces between them.
In the canal, branches of which intersect the
whole region, are boats of a peculiar flat-bottomed
construction, and with covered cabins like
gondolas, and here and there are placed at
regular intervals fire-engines, which, covered
over with a canopy to keep them dry, have
a strange look of litters in which patients
struck with fever are carried to the hospital.
There is about this isolated place a stilled sense
of apprehension, which suggests that it is a
territory of risk and the head-quarters of danger.

And so, indeed, it is, but ordered with such
care, guarded with such watchful diligence, that
the place is a triumph of precaution, and a
standing honour and credit to all connected with
its organisation. It is here that the cartridges
are filled, that the rockets are driven, and the
signals prepared; in one word, it is the peculiar
region set aside for the execution of all the more
dangerous operations connected with the Arsenal.

Before entering this department, your Eye-witness,
and the gentleman who accompanied
him (and to whose patience and courtesy he is
much indebted), were shod in leather slippers,
lest by any chance there might be a nail in the
heels of their boots, which, coming in contact
with some grain of grit, might raise a spark of
fire. In the room in which they were thus shod
were hanging the ordinary clothes of the workmen
employed in the place, who are all compelled
to put on the safety dress of the War Department:
parting with their own garments
before they enter on their labours lest it should
happen that an old tobacco-pipe, or a lucifer-match,
or anything else considered dangerous by
the authorities, should be introduced into the
workshops.