shall contain its proper fifty-two cards; and
the tying up into neat packets. How the
fingers and the eye can do so much is a matter
for wonderment to a looker-on; but true it
is that our dexterous workwoman can thus
scrutinise, and classify, and arrange two
hundred packs—ten thousand cards—in a day.

The packs are made up, and papered, and
tied, but they must not be sold until the
exciseman has done his part. He comes at
intervals, and superintends the pasting on of
the stamp, or semi-wrapper, which permits
the pack to go forth whither it will. The
rejected cards—the cards which have more
than the one or the two allowable (because
almost invisible) specks—are not thrown
away; there are men who will buy almost
everything, and among them are men who
buy these waste cards, not to metamorphose
them into other things, but to make up passable
packs out of heterogeneous odds and
ends. What they do, and how they do it, are
inscrutable mysteries, not known, we believe,
even to the manufacturers who sell the waste
cards; whether they boil them, or stew them,
or scrape them, or paint them, or otherwise
doctor them—no matter, the cards come
forth as bran new cards.

It will be quite evident, from the details
given in this paper, that a large amount
of ingenuity is displayed in manufacturing
the half million packs of cards which the
Messrs. De la Rue, and the five or six other
manufacturers who furnish our supply,
produce annually.

THE ROVING ENGLISHMAN:

WITH A BARON MUCH INTERESTED IN HIM.

I AM in Dresden; my apartment is a
suite of five fine lofty airy rooms, on the second
and best floor of a palace, in the most fashionable
quarter of the town; and I pay a sum in
German money equivalent to about three
pounds English, monthly. My rooms, indeed,
are not carpeted, save by a little strip of
something that looks like drugget placed
along the side of my bedstead. I rejoice at
this, however, and I think, perhaps if some
people I have met only knew what a receptacle
of invisible abominations an ill-kept carpet is,
they might be glad enough to exchange it for
the spotless surface of a polished floor.

What is especially convenient, also, is the
arrangement of my little dwelling. In the
first place it is all upon one floor, and the
doors, the upper part of which are of stained
glass—so that you cannot see through them—
open from one room to the other. My sitting-
room is, of course, the best of the suite, and
is almost as large as an English ball-room in
a country house. Let me look round it. The
paper is of a plain light stone colour, which
serves to set oft to considerable advantage the
pictures which hang round the room in quaint
antique frames—pleasing and suggestive of
thought enough, which I take to be the real
charm of pictures but rather too numerous
and too formally placed. Too numerous,
because my host is an artist, and, I fear, an
ingenious fabricator of old pictures; and too
formally placed, because it is scarcely natural
in the Germans to be tasteful in the arrangement
of anything.

A noble chandelier of cut glass hangs in the
centre of the room, and is somewhat too grand
for it, large and spacious as it is; but, upon
the whole, it is a graceful ornament, and,
with the light playing and sparkling among
the cuttings of the glass, enlivens the apartment
amazingly. Then there is no end to the
looking-glasses in all directions, so that my
sitting-room would be the paradise of a
coquette or a dandy, but unfortunately there
is no getting at any of them. Between the two
windows—unlucky position—the principal
mirror is slung a great deal too high, and
behind an immoveable sofa, so that there is
no getting at that. It is a bad glass, also, in
spite of its gay frame, and makes me look
like the pictures of Voltaire in his old age.
Then, over the door, high and far beyond
utility, like some fine people we meet now
and then in the world, is placed a circular
mirror; but, as when I approach it I seem to
be walking on my head, I seldom look up at
that. Two others, again, are let into the
wall, but as they have the disadvantage of
being almost entirely covered and completely
darkened by the curtains, I don't look at them.

Neither can I say much for the furniture,
which consists of about a dozen of the hardest,
most untractable, uneasy chairs, sofas, and
tables I ever had any dealings with. They
are made of veneered wood, badly glued
together, and are always giving way at
unseasonable times. He must have been a
cunning upholsterer who covered those shiny
unsafe chairs, and who designed that sofa,
which never could be laid down upon by any
conceivable tact and self-arrangement. Indeed,
it is as well to study the art of balancing
one's self under difficulties before attempting
even to sit down; for these articles of furniture
are endued with an inner garment of a
poor but gaudy kind of satin, extremely
slippery, and an outer one of glazed chintz.
Hold tight, might be a good watchword
under such circumstances even in the case of
an English chair; but with these it is impossible
to take any liberties. Unless you sit
down very gingerly and respectfully indeed,
some part of the wood-work is certain to give
way. and let you through the seat or backwards,
as the case may be.

I cannot say that these things discompose
me much. I like my rooms, upon the whole,
infinitely better than Sir Harcourt Berkeley's
little confined rabbit-hutch of a lodging in
Duke Street, St. James's, for which he pays
five guineas a week, or something more than
six times the price that I pay. I have got over
the English prejudice about fires, too, and
begin to think that a handsome china stove,