years. The place is a kind of cosmopolis. No
one patent, no one manufacturer, is favoured in
particular: any machine is accepted from
anywhere, provided it will render the required
amount of service.

There are few things more marvellous in
mechanical art than the shaping of the various parts
of an Enfield rifle by machinery. Take the stock,
for instance. Walnut-wood is imported from
Italy, and is roughly sawn into pieces approximately
resembling the stock, with a broad part,
at one end for the butt. These pieces are placed
in a series of machines, one after another; they
are made to rotate rapidly, and self-acting
cutting-tools shape them with wonderful quickness
and accuracy. The curvatures of the stock, as
one knows, are very varying and intricate,
yet they are all effected by the machines; and so
are the sockets and recesses which receive the
barrel, the ramrod, the bayonet, the lock, the
plates, the screws, the sight. It follows, too,
from the unerring accuracy of the machines, that
every stock is exactly like every other, insomuch
that a lock or a barrel that will fit any of them
will fit all.

Look at the lock again. Pieces of white-hot
steel are stamped, punched, and swaged in such
a way as to assume the rough forms of the
several pieces of a rifle-lock; and then each
piece is brought under the action of exquisite
machines, which, passing in succession over every
minute hundredth or thousandth of an inch of
surface, give the proper size, shape, and polish
to everything. Then the barrel. Pieces of the
finest iron that can be made, called skelps, are
brought to the factory. Each skelp, about
thirteen inches by five, and rather more than half
an inch thick, is heated in a forge, passed between
rollers, bent round to a cylinder, heated again,
elongated by drawing, and made into a rough
sort of barrel. This barrel is turned or bored on
the inside, and turned on the outside. Woe
betide the barrel-borer who thinks a thousandth
of an inch an insignificant trifle! If he deviates
more than this minute quantity from the formula,
"nought decimal five seven eight," he loses his
labour, and is perhaps fined in the bargain. The
barrel-inspector is a keen-eyed man; nothing
escapes him; he is provided with steel plugs or
gauges, some of which must, while others must
not, pass through the finished barrel; and then,
by looking through the barrel at a window, he
can detect the smallest irregularity in the
interior. If it is the long Enfield that is being
made, the barrel must be three feet and a
quarter long, must have three spiral grooves
three-sixteenths of an inch in width, and the
spiral must make just half a turn in the whole
length. If it is the short Enfield, to carry a
sword-bayonet, some of these numbers undergo
modification. If it is the Whitworth rifle, the
six grooves must twist round much more sharply
than in the Enfield.

The putting together affords a proof of the
wonderful accuracy with which all the separate
parts are shaped. There are sixty or seventy
pieces altogether in an Enfield army rifle,
including screws, which have required several
hundred distinct and successive processes to
form; these are reduced to about twenty, by
joining some of the smaller pieces together; and
the twenty are handed to the screwer-up or
putter-together. Fastening a stock in a vice, he
takes a barrel from one heap, a lock iron from
another, a butt-plate from another, a belt-swivel
from another, a bayonet-ring from another, and
so forth; and in four minutes he builds up the
complete rifle, all firm, smooth, and well fitted.
There is no niggling, chipping off a bit here and
a bit there, to make them fit; everything is
known beforehand to be correct to a hundredth
of an inch, and in some instances to a thousandth.

There is certainly much to be proud of in the
place. One magnificent room contains several
hundred machines, to effect the greater part of
the shaping-operations; and we get a little
amazed at the quantity of soap and water used
to lubricate these machines while in action.
Then there is the smithery, with its forest of
cupola forge-fires, and its mechanism for forging,
stamping, and otherwise shaping the various
pieces of iron. There is the foundry, for casting
such articles of brass, copper, or gun-metal as
there may be in a rifle. There is the bayonet-
shop, where the toughest of all steel is made into
one of the most provoking of all weapons. There
is the annealing and tempering-shop, where the
metal is brought to a great nicety of hardness
without brittleness. There is the grinding-room,
with a stock of monster Derbyshire grindstones,
which wear away under the ordeal to which they
are exposed. There is the polishing-room, where
the last finish is given to various parts of the
rifle. There is the pattern and model department
—the type and symbol of the wonderful
precision which pertains to the several machines.
These and many other rooms and shops give
employment to a number of men varying from
twelve hundred to two thousand, according to
the briskness of the operations. With the
exception of a few labourers, all are paid piece-
work; and this gives a notable sharpness and
energy to the men, since the amount of each
one's earnings is intimately dependent on his
steady application to the bench. Many of the
men are in some sense small masters or contractors,
taking more of a particular kind of work
than they can do with their own hands, and
paying others to help them. Enfield says that
she can make government rifles cheaper than
Birmingham.

Enfield is just now very busy preparing for a
process of transformation. The grand battle of
breech-loaders versus muzzle-loaders is, it
appears, decided in favour of the former; and the
government are about to see what can be done
in utilising the rifled muskets already manufactured
on the last-named principle. A year or
two ago, the War Office invited gunmakers to
submit plans for converting the Enfield rifle into
a breech-loader. The conditions were, that the
cost of alteration should not exceed one pound
per rifle, and that the shooting-qualities, should
in no sense be impaired. The gunsmiths set to