work could be cut by machinery is technically
called an improved jigger. Though making a
din equal to the falling down of a slate-covered
shed, this instrument is guided by a beardless
youth. Many a thousand burrows cut by this
machine are now in the gold diggings of Australia.
The other is a noiseless saw, and of the
sort which Frenchmen have the merit of originating,
being an endless riband saw running
outside two wood-padded wheels. It is chiefly
available for cutting out the circular work of
doors and windows, staircase wreaths, and material
for the shipwright and wheelwright.
Between the two saws there is no shape in
mathematics that cannot be traversed and cut
out.

I see planing machines. The first I pass is
hurling out a storm of dull coloured heavy flakes.
An attendant stops the machine to show how the
planing ways are divided into alternate systems
of top cutters, each one deepening the work of
the other, and helped underneath by bottom
cutters, all screwed firmly in revolving boxes. A
series of side teeth, whirling away like high-
mettled clockwork, work at the same time upon
the flanks.

The object now under the rollers is a piece of
oak twenty feet long, twelve inches wide, and
four inches thick, for the caisson of a water-
works. I pass the machine again after an hour's
interval, and the lad's or donkey engines are
engaged in dragging from its teeth shavings from
five to six feet long and a foot wide, upon which
the red, yellow, and white veins of the pine
timber are beautifully visible, they are like silk
ribbons which only nature could vein after that
fashion, and to imitate which would puzzle all
the Gobelins tapissiers of the Rue Mouffetard
in Paris.

The wheel of Fortune hazard-board at a
country fair, with its index like a mariner's
needle, may suggest the form of the American
thicknessing or planing machine when at rest.
I can fancy that I see, in the machine at work,
one of these wheels magnified immensely, whistling
round and round, with the underside of the
game uppermost and the sharp ends of the
needle bent down for remorseless chipping
away at uneven parts of the self-feeding timber—
chipping, too, at a rate which makes the very
shavings for a while invisible.

The third planing machine, more complex than
the others, resembled a huge piece of iron filigree.
It is used chiefly for striking mouldings out of
soft pinewoods. A shark's-toothed contrivance
is upon its feeding rollers to help the rough
timbers on. I see two smaller tearaways, two
morticing machines, and a tennoning tool. I
see also the embryo of a machine which is intended
to make ledge doors by a cheap process.
As the plan is similar, I have it now explained
to me how the frameworks of the three thousand
Crimean huts were made here so expeditiously
in the years '55 and '56 by machines which, for
the present, are laid up in ordinary. In the first
set of one thousand three hundred huts made
at these works, there were three hundred and
thirty miles of three-inch joists, six hundred and
seventy miles of cover boards, and nine thousand
five hundred cubic feet of timber. Thanks
to machinery, the work was got through in the
four weeks specified. Like contrivances helped
to fulfil a contract with the Emperor of the
French, who sent hither a company of soldiers,
with lieutenant and colonel, to practise the erection
of their huts upon the quickest plan. I am
shown also the contrivances by which many
thousands of doors and windows were made for
the hospitals in Renkioi and other places. I
see also photographs of the foreign contracts made
here in one of the offices, and it seems that the
chief timber merchants in this city pride themselves
in these works, and whether for Spanish
railways, Wallachian stations, or Indian telegraph
houses, if the word is given to produce
production follows. I am shown also the shed
under which a wooden mansion, costing nearly
three thousand five hundred pounds, was built,
and sent in parts, lettered and numbered, to
New South Wales, during a mania for speculation,
which caused a monthly despatch from
these yards of not fewer than a thousand doors
and windows for the Yarra-Yarra.

Evening closes before I have done seeing the
saws.

Stumbling over the limbs of a steam frictional
pile engine which did duty at the launch of the
Great Eastern for the Messrs. Tredwell, I look
for the last time on the three main sheds. In the
first of them forty thousand tons of timber are
cut up in a year, entering as log and coming out
veneer. Into the second, timber enters square
to come out with as many moulded sides as
there are forms in the kaleidoscope. Into the
third, a rough scantling of timber enters to
come out a door, a window, a staircase, a wardrobe,
or, in fact, almost anything that can be
made of wood.

TURKISH BURIAL-GROUNDS.

IF I were to go to-morrow and stand tiptoe
on the sharp horns of the great golden crescent
that caps the dome of St. Sophia, and if, being in
that painful and acrobatic position, I had nerve
enough to look round me, I should see, stretching
on every side of Constantine's great city, a
black belt of cypresses girdling the town, like
some vast funeral procession, such as would
befit the dissolution of an imperial dynasty or
the downfal of a nation, a race, or a religion. It
scarcely matters whether the sky be golden or
crimson, for the trees never cease their sentinel
watch and ward, and Stamboul, the Sultan's
city, is kept permanently in blockade by them.
But for the gorgeous sunshine, and the perpetual
smile of sky and sea, they would succeed
in giving an undertaker gloom to the whole
place, and would, in the traveller's gayest moments,
strike thoughts of shrouded and coffined
Turk, into the most laughing heart.

There is no escaping the sight of those dull,
grim trees, which seem like many horrible