The manufacture of gold-lace affords a
pretty exemplification, of the making and
using of wire. Gold lace, however, is not
gold-lace, for the gold is but a covering for
silver lace; and indeed the silver lace is
not silver lace, for the silver is but a covering
for silk lace. A knotty enigma this,
altogether. Gold-lace may be considered as a
kind of ribbon, of which the coarse and weft
threads are of silk coated with gilt silver.
How the metal becomes gradually thinned
and thinned, until fitted to perform its work,
is curious to see. First, a good stout rod of
solid silver is prepared, perhaps an inch in
thickness by a couple of feet in length. The
rod is heated; a layer of leaf-gold is placed
upon it; this layer is burnished down;
another layer is placed and burnished; and
another, and another, and another—several
layers of gold, but a trifle after all; for to a
pound of silver there may perhaps be not
more than a hundred grains of the more
precious metal. Then is the gilt-silver rod
annealed, and drawn successively through
many holes in a steel plate, until reduced to
a slender rod about one-fifth of an inch in
diameter: the gold, like the silver, becoming
elongated as it becomes thinned. Then the
wire-drawer takes it, and draws and draws
until the slender rod becomes a minute wire
—using holes pierced through rubies when
the wire becomes very fine indeed. And then
the wire is flattened, and is wound or spun
upon a silken thread, and the threads so made
are woven or braided into a ribbon. But of
what thickness is the silver wire with which
the silk is encased? It seldom exceeds the
size of a delicate hair. And of what thickness
is the gold with which the silver is encased?
Arithmeticians and manufacturers have laid
their heads together, and have come to a
conclusion, that the gold on the finest gilt-silver
wire does not exceed in thickness one-third
of a millionth part of an inch; and yet it is
uniform and homogeneous, without breaks
even when viewed under the power of a
moderate microscope. A little slate-and-
pencil work will show that, if a coined
sovereign could be beaten or drawn out to this
almost inconceivable degree of thinness, it
would form a ribbon an inch in width, and
long enough completely to engirdle the
Crystal Palace at Sydenham, wings, and towers,
and all!

Filagree is another pretty kind of wire-work.
Silver wire, or gold wire, or gilt silver wire,
is here twisted into fantastic and artistic
forms, partly by the fingers and partly by
small tools and machines. Some of the
productions in this art, especially those
produced in Italy and in India, are
wonderful for the patience bestowed upon them.
It is scarcely English art: we seem to be
busy and bustling to bestow time on
these prettinesses. The wire is very thin,
but of course much exceeding the thickness
of the film of gold on the silver wire
for gold lace. Perhaps the thinnest bit of
wire ever actually made and isolated was that
produced by Dr. Wollaston, a philosopher
who had an extraordinary knack of doing
things which no one else could do. He
procured a small rod of silver; he bored a
little hole through it from end to end; he
inserted into this hole the smallest platinum
wire he could procure; he subjected the
silver rod to wire drawing processes, until it
became the finest of silver-wires with a
platinum filament running along its centre; he
dissolved the silver in warm nitrous acid—
and there remained an exquisite little platinum
wire, one thirty-thousandth of an inch
in thickness!

MODERN ANCIENTS.

ALTHOUGH they are, upon the whole, rude,
dirty, and superstitious, I like no peasantry
better than that among which I am in the
habit of wandering in Brittany. They all
seem to me picturesque in their minds, partly
by reason of their sense of poetry, and partly
because they retain so much of what was
striking in the old customs and notions of
their ancestors and ours. I make my head
quarters at Nantes, and consider myself very
happily surrounded.

Nantes itself is, to my mind, a magnificent
city, clasped in the many arms of the great
river Loire; a city of smiling islands and gay
flat meadows full of flowers; a place of bridges,
antique towers, and broad quays, bristling
with masts from all nations. The towers and
walls of the old Château de l'Hermine, once
the seat of the Dukes of Brittany, though
now serving as a powder-magazine, speak to
me of days when gunpowder was not. So
does the Cathedral; and there is no lack of
stone sermons in the statues of the famous
Duchess Anne, and her lineage, and those of
the great captains De Clisson and Duguesclin
which are scattered about in the thirty or
forty public squares that give air to the
town.

It is worth the while of any man of leisure
to come over and pass three or four weeks at
Nantes; making excursions from thence to
and fro by diligence, and establishing some
sort of acquaintance with the country
people.

Tracts have not superseded their legendary
song; and many ballads, quite as touching
and as tender as the ancient lays of Scotland,
may be heard at this day from the lips of
wandering bards, who sing, without a harp,
matter familiar and dear to all the crowd that
listens.

The Bretons are all born to song. Field-
labourers in the villages, and workmen in the
small towns, receive in Brittany little instruction
beyond what the priests, who generally
spring from their own ranks, afford. As
they are imaginative and excitable, they
supply their want of other knowledge by