wealthy: these require the services of the
most skilled artisans in the cartonnage trade.
Next in rank come the boxes and small
cartonnage decorations required by the
confectioner, for the tasteful adornment of his
table sweets, or for packing the smaller
sweets for sale. Another class of boxes
comprises those used for packing the numerous
nameless trinkets which the French are in
the habit of selling at twenty-five sous per
box. Fourth on the list are found those
boxes which are used to contain perfumery,
fans, gloves, and various articles of
haberdashery. Boxes of the fifth class, larger in
size but humbler in quality, are those which
may be seen on the shelves of mercers and
milliners and haberdashers, containing the
largest kinds of goods which can conveniently
be placed in paper boxes. The sixth, smallest
and cheapest, but the most numerous and
certainly not the least commercially
important, are productions of the pill-box and
wafer-box genus. In neatness of execution,
and lightness and delicacy of ornament, this
French cartonnage maintains a high reputation.
Besides the above six classes, the
boxes for containing fruit are largely made in
France, especially at Bordeaux.

Wherever the manufacture of lace, gloves,
or light articles of haberdashery and hosiery
is largely carried on, there is sure to be an
extensive demand for paper boxes. Thus,
paper boxes are made in Manchester,
Nottingham, Leicester, and Belfast, as well as in
Birmingham, for the innumerable trinkets of
that town. The paper duty presses heavily
on this home manufacture. Lest any one
should imagine that boxes and wrappers and
labels for manufactured goods are trifling
matters, we may just meution that Belfast
is said to spend eighty thousand pounds a
year for the ornamental wrappers alone in
which Irish linen is bound for export, and
that the School of Design in that town is
looked forward to as a means of educating
designers for this as well as other departments
of artistic adornment for manufactures.

In the higher departments of paper box
making, the fabrication of the box itself is a
small matter compared with the adornment.
The smoothly rolled carton or pasteboard is
cut to size; and by delicate touches of the
scissors, and the paste-brush, and the gum-
pencil, the structure is built up: the paint
and the varnish, the enamel and the gelatine,
the gold and the embossment, do the rest.
There are writing-desks and work-boxes now
made of carton, presenting an exquisite delicacy
of appearance: the colour and texture of
tin- carton itself presenting an unexceptionable
groundwork on which taste may be
afterwards displayed. Time has been when
carton delicacies—" papyro-plastics "—were a
favourite object of fire-side lady-like pursuit;
out the never ending crochet- needle seems to
have set these nearly aside.

It is, however, in relation to the smaller
and cheaper paper boxes that the commercial
or manufacturing features are most worthy
of attention. Small haberdashery, small
confectionary, and small trinkets, are packed to
an immense extent in boxes made with
surprising cheapness. Some of these boxes,
though paper externally, are really made of
wood; they are of the kind called scaleboard.
A pretty art this is, of making scaleboard out
of a thick plank. There is a sharp cutting
instrument, bearing much resemblance to an
ordinary plane-iron; it is as long as a plank
is wide, and is used to cut off a layer, or
shaving, or veneer, or scale from the plank.
The plank is moved by a steam-engine, and is
drawn steadily over the inverted plane-iron
(which is fitted to a bench), by which a slice
is shaved off; and this is repeated until the
whole thickness of the plank is sliced away.
So nice has now become this art, that with a
very smooth-grained and regular kind of deal,
one hundred and twenty films or scales are
occasionally cut from an inch of thickness;
for it must be remembered that there is no
sawdust, no waste: like a well-conditioned
wheaten loaf, the plank may be sliced without
making crumbs. It is, however, rarely that
the wood is cut to such extreme thinness as
this: a thirtieth or fortieth of an inch is a
much more usual and useful thickness. This,
then, is the scaleboard employed by the box-
maker; he procures it from the saw-mills,
and forthwith fashions it to his wants. The
scale is cut half through, and turned up to
form sides and ends; thin paper is pasted on
both sides, to strengthen the slender structure
and to form the hinges; a little paste or glue
cements the junctures; and the outer covering
of smarter paper gives much of the
strength and all of the beauty which the box
may present.

But the boxes of which we are now speaking
—oblong quadrangular boxes from an inch
or two to a foot or two in length—are not all
made of scaleboard: some are formed of
carton or pasteboard. The pasteboard
consists of numerous sheets of paper, pasted, and
pressed, and rolled into a homogeneous
substance. The pasteboard, like the scaleboard,
is cut half through, at the boundary of the
length and breadth of the box, to permit the
outlying pieces to be turned up for forming
the sides and ends, and little square bits are
cut out at the corners to enable these turnings-
up to take place. In most of such boxes
the horizontal edges form tolerably strong
joints, simply because the carton remains in
one piece, being not cut through; while the
vertical edges are secured rather by the
paper with which the box is usually lined
and covered, than by direct applications of
glue or paste.

What would any such box be worth, how-
ever, without its external beauty? The reader
may rest assured that this beauty—real or
conventional, as the case may be—is a subject of
most serious thought to the maker. How poor