done by making the box of double thickness,
one box within another; so adjusted as to
size that there may be left a shoulder or ledge
upon which the lid may fit; these, of course, go
far beyond our sixpence a gross boxes. These,
too, have an additional adornment; for there
are strips of dark purple paper pasted so
neatly around them as to leave clean white
edges. The sheets of purple paper are cut
into narrow strips; the strips are laid down,
perhaps twenty in parallel rows, on a bench,
they are all pasted at once, of course on the
white side; a girl takes a box or a lid in
hand, applies a pasted strip around it, and
employs a pair of scissors to cut off the strip
at the right place and the right time. How
she manages to hold the box and the scissors
and the strips, and to do the work in a fraction
of the tenth of a minute is one among
many wonders in this very curious art.

There are a few pill-boxes of greater preten-
sions—pill-boxes made of turned wood—pill-
boxes made with glass tops; but we deem
our old familiar chip and paper boxes much
more interesting, at least in connexion with
the details of their manufacture.

CROSSING THE ISTHMUS OF
PANAMA.

ON October the 2nd, 1852, the packet Sierra
Nevada arrived from New York at Aspinwall,
the newly- erected American city of the
Isthmus, with about two hundred passengers
bound for St. Francisco. Aspinwall, a name
given to this infant settlement in honour of
one of the principal directors of this line of
steamers, consists of forty or fifty wooden
houses run up at a trifling expense in the
midst of dense tropical vegetation, springing
out of a low marshy swamp. It is situated
about six miles east of the old city of
Chagres and west of Portobello, in about the
most unhealthy spot on the coast; and here
the Atlantic terminus of the railway is
established.

The republic of New Granada, to which
this country belongs, disputes the right of
these Americans—and perhaps justly so—to
name any place in their territory without the
consent of their President and Congress;
consequently, they have given this town the
name of " Colon," after the great discoverer
of their country, and refuse to acknowledge
any document in which the new town is called
by any other name.

A motley crowd of passengers landed from
the Sierra Nevada, and crowded to the railway
cars, on the morning of the 2nd of October.
Here was the owner of a Californian saw mill
with his wife, sister, and six children—there
a learned judge; in other spots might be seen
a crowd of rough lumber men from the pine
forests of Maine, going to seek their fortunes
in the far west; New York tradesmen and
merchants going to see friends, or to attend to
some business in San Francisco; broken down
soldiers from the Mexican war going on no
business at all; an engineer with his old
father, a septuagenarian, and large family; a
party of Englishmen engaged to work a silver
mine in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada;
a young German with a daguerrotype of his
lady-love, bound to the " diggings" to make
a fortune previous to his marriage; with
many others, all bustling to and fro on the
platform under a burning sun, and jostling
each other most unceremoniously.

At length all was ready, the whistle sounded,
the cars started, and away we went, plunging
each minute deeper and deeper into the
thick pestilential forest; whose rank
vegetation rises from a black unwholesome morass.
Lofty trees, whose age may be counted by
centuries, creepers of every description, flowers
of all hues, palms, plantains, and every kind
of tropical plant, crowd here one upon
another in the thickest confusion, and as they
wither and die away, others spring up; while
the decaying matter sends up a fever, which
cleared off, by scores and scores, the unhappy
workmen of that fatal railroad. At high
noon our destination was reached, at the spot
where the railway at present ends, on the
banks of the Chagres river, where a little
village has risen up of five or six huts, called
Barbacoas. The railroad from Aspinwall to
Barbacoas is twenty-five miles in length,
consisting of only a single line, and reached
this point about two months ago; in about
nine months more, it will have worked its
way along the banks of the Rio Chagres,
Obispo, and Grande, to Panama.

At Barbacoas we were surrounded by a
host of most truculent looking Indians, the
owners of boats; and after struggling for
luggage, amidst the shrieks and execrations of
unprotected females, long bearded adventurers,
bowie-knived Americans, and "one
English gentleman," under a blazing sun, and
in a swamp of rotten mud, which presents
itself in the place of a platform to the
Barbacoas station, we at length assembled—a
party of nine men, three women, and seven
children—in a long flat bottomed boat covered
over with a wooden awning, and committed
our lives and fortunes to the care of Chagres
boatmen. The current runs with great rapidity,
and the men punt the boats against the stream
with long poles, by thrusting as they walk
along a ledge round the sides of the boat, like
bargemen in our own narrow rivers. Six of
these conveyances left Barbacoas and began
to work their slow and weary way up the
river, which is bounded on either side by
densely tangled tropical forests, among which
thousands of butterflies and humming-birds,
of the most brilliant colours, disport
themselves in the rays of the sun, while flocks of
noisy paroquets fly about in every direction
among the higher branches of the trees. We
had a Texan in the boat, who had been in
many " horrid and dismal places," but
anything to equal this "tar-nation Isthmus" he