with him, doing their best to catch the veteran;
and then, spread over four or five miles, the ruck
at every pace, down to a "trot and creep,"
through the gaps made by the flyers.

But with all-Dick's love of a fast thing, he
seems not to be of the mind of the huntsman,
who, on a bad scenting day, complained of
"them stinking violets," for, coming to a
wood, in summer, he cries, "Pretty place, this!
Thorpe Russell's looks like a flower-garden now,
don't it? How sweet the roses and honey-suckles
smell! Take the reins. I must step
out and get a bunch for my old woman, she's
such a one for flowers." This bit of gallantry,
by-the-by, was paid to our Centaur's third wife.
He sketches off the leading characteristics of
two celebrated sportsmen in a very few words.
Assheton Smith, the mighty hunter (who died
the other day), said, if a horse refuses, "Throw
your heart over, and your horse will follow."
He never rode fast at his fences; his moral was,
"If a man rides fast at his fences, depend upon
it he funks."

Sir Harry Goodrick, who died young, was
a different stamp of man. "So quiet with the
stockingers (stocking-weavers), he had 'em at a
word. 'Now, my good fellows, you've quite
as good a right to see sport as we have; do get
back a little and keep quiet.' And they'd be
as quiet as mice while the hounds were drawing
cover."

Sir Harry always sent a hare and a brace of
pheasants to the foreman, from his Norfolk
estate. "They're good ones for fox-hounds,
though; that's right enough with them. They
can't abide steeple-chases, and stag-hounds, and
harriers, and all that sort of tiling. I don't
wonder at it; many of their farms are just like
gardens."

With this sentence we leave the veteran of a
hundred, or more likely a thousand, falls, for the
consideration of the curious in characters.

WISE SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES.

I SEE an English timber-yard ten acres in extent.
Twelve years ago it was a swampy meadow,
and at this time part of it is useless because covered
four or five feet deep with sawdust. That
is, the dust made about ten years ago by thirty
or forty hand-sawyers who then worked upon
the spot. It is a strange kind of surface soil;
and on its weathered surface there grows only a
strange kind of scarlet mushroom, nothing else.

I see my timber-yard at Gloucester in the
form of saw and machine joinery works, of
which the sheds alone (some of the largest
sprang up mushroom fashion in a single day)
have absorbed not a few Baltic and American
cargoes. Lines of rail form a net over the
yard. These I observe to be blockaded with
some trucks of timber cut for the Midland
Railway at the rate of three thousand superficial
feet an hour by saws that are almost six feet in
diameter. I go to the shed in which three of
these saws are at work, and am struck by the
regularity with which logs of the hugest size,
after they have been searched for nail stumps,
are seized at the middle by the long-necked
cranes and placed upon the pairs of wrought-
iron slides, which, when the advance gear is set
on, carry them under the three sets of revolving
teeth. When a piece of timber has been cut by
one of these saws, it is swung round into an adjoining
shed, two hundred feet long, where it is,
by smaller saws, cut into scantlings. Some of
these thin circular tools are so fine that eighty
Venetian window-blinds can be stripped out of a
space eleven inches wide.

The rapid disappearance of the sawdust
puzzles me until I am shown the action of
the sweeping machine. Traversing the piling
vaulted foundations on toothed wheels, it buckets
away to the furnace all that falls. The sawdust
was embarrassing before there were built two
Manchester boilers, having furnaces able to
elaborate steam with the aid of such poor fuel.
The sheds used frequently to be surrounded by
a thousand tons of all kinds of wood dust, and
about half that quantity still lies near the sheds.
Packed as it is into shelving layers, a dim-sighted
geologist might take it to be a red sandstone
quarry. The coal saved daily by the use of sawdust
and of refuse timber which is too small for
other use, is two and a half tons. Professor
Faraday told the proprietors of these mills that
he knew no way of making manure out of sawdust.
But the question, can it not be compressed
into a useful building material, is one
perhaps worthy consideration by the scores of
men who like to spend their money upon filing
declarations in the Patent Offices.

The saw of saws to see here is the vertical-frame
saw, which, when fixed complete, costs
upwards of five hundred pounds. It sits upon
ten tons of solid stone, and it will bite a log of
thirty inches wide into a hundred or more boards
at a single munch of its great jaws. In these
mills there is a compound contrivance which
enables this saw to work noiselessly. The ribs
and shoulders of the machine are altered by the
insertion of spring rollers when deals and planks
are to be sawn instead of home logs and foreign
baulks.

Delicate saws are the cross-cuts, spinning and
toiling ever and ever round and round. They
are fixed at the base of a depending frame, which
is brought forward by a handle when a rectangular
cut is wanted, and, when released into
the back catch again, still they continue spinning.
A fenced contrivance flanks some of these saws
whereby timber may be bevelled to any angle.
I see a saw of this sort ripping out the V-shaped
pieces for the ridges of the rifle corps huts with
the patent wave-jointed boarding. The next
circular, not less than an inch thick, is at work
upon a continuous boxing and cover for underground
wires of the telegraph.

Supported by an iron column, close to a wood-boaring
machine, I see two saws used by the
men in rivalry for cutting out circular sweeps
and fancy scrolls. One works from an eccentric
shaft, and the first invention by which curved