insteps, and ankles; but the better varieties,
besides a little shapeable trimming about the
bust, have symmetrical calves given to their
legs. A very poor doll—a doll which has to
work its way in humble life—has wooden
arms as well as wooden legs; but if the doll
occupies a higher grade in the social scale,
the probability is that she has leather arms,
stuffed with sawdust. The doll-maker must
be an artist as well as a woodcutter, for he
has to paint eyes, and eyebrows, and lips, and
hair—unless indeed the price will enable him
to use real hair; in this case he buys the
leather arms from one sub-manufacturer, and
real hair wigs or ringlets from another. What
is the very lowest price at which the very
humblest doll can be bought at a toy-shop,
most little girls could say better than we
can; but hundreds of grosses are sold by
the makers to the shopkeepers at a farthing
a-piece, and we appeal to the judgment of a
British public whether much calf or many
ringlets are to be expected at such a price.
Some of our manufacturers can boast of
having produced half a million little dolls in a
year. The French can sell dressed dolls,
including bonnet, so low as eightpence per
dozen, and undressed composition dolls at
twopence-halfpenny per dozen!

But the more ladylike dolls have a wider
and larger manufacturing importance; they are
the product of many minds and many hands.
Like a watch, they have to derive one
component part from one artist, one from a second,
one from a third; while the master-hand
puts together all the little bits which others
have made for him. Jane Tibbs's wooden doll
has just passed under our notice; let us now
see what Miss Emily Augusta de Swellermode's
doll is made of.

There is no stern relentless wooden body to
this doll. It is made of yielding and manageable
calico, stuffed with saw-dust, hair, or wool,
according to its quality. The maker gives
out the cut calico and the stuffing; and women
and girls are paid so much per dozen or per
gross for sewing the former and putting in
the latter. As the doll mounts in price, so
does the symmetry of its figure increase: a
more elaborate display of mathematical skill
being visible in the cutting of the calico, and
greater liberality in giving plumpness by the
stuffing. The body-stuffers are not arm or
leg-stuffers; and thus while the former are
at work, the latter are also doing their duty
in the general cause. The arms and legs are
frequently or perhaps usually made of sheeps-
leather, stuffed with saw-dust if not with
better material. Little girls would look sad
to learn what a small fractional part of a penny
a woman receives for stuffing a pair of arms.
The head is not made of wood, or of stuffed
calico, or of stuffed leather; it is being made
by another person while the body and limbs
are rising into existence. The head may
perchance be made of paper or pasteboard or
papier mâché: a very general material for
middle-class dolls, although Miss Ernily may
hear it called a " composition " head. The
maker has by him a wax model for each kind
and form of head; from this model he makes
a mould, and in this mould he fashions im-
pressions made of a kind of sugar-paper; a
grey, grimy, unfeminine sort of face is thus
produced; but when it has been delicately
tinted in flesh-colour, and dipped into a bath
of semi-transparent wax, its beauty becomes
developed, and we have before us the head
of a "composition" doll. If it be a real
bona fide wax-doll, however, there is no such
common material about it as papier mâché;
but into the mould is poured molten wax
instead of pulpy paper, and a waxen head and
throat result. If, as Is now often the case, a
gutta-percha lady be the object in view, the
mould is made to yield a cast in this material,
which cast is a little humanized and
beautified by subsequent external adornment.

While the head itself is being made by this
artist, the doll's perruquier is not idle; he is
at work on the beautiful ringlets, and
perhaps eye-brows and eye-lashes; he employs
real human hair, and is not unworthy of the
rank of a wig-maker. While all this is doing,
the doll's milliner and dressmaker is earnestly
preparing the attire for the young lady: unless
indeed the doll be sold in that state of semi-
impropriety which is the wont of some dolls.
Many dolls have knitted cotton dresses, in
part or all over the figure, even to the
bonnet, and it is whispered (but of course only
whispered) that these knitted dresses are
especially approved for their power of assuming
a certain bustle-like rotundity at the
proper part of the figure.

We had nearly forgotten the dolls' eyes—
those glassy brilliants without which Miss
Emily's doll would be scarcely better than
Jane Tibbs's. They are made by the same
persons as those who manufacture artificial
eyes for human creatures. The commonest
kind are merely glass beads, or little hollow
spheres, differing according to the care
afterwards bestowed on the painting of them.
In respect to glass beads, properly so called,
few persons perhaps could be prepared to
believe that we import ten thousand pounds'
worth annually, besides those made at home.
There is (or was) a famous glass-bead factory
at Murano near Venice, where they are made
in the following way. Tubes of glass, of
various colours, are drawn out to great length,
in a gallery adjoining the glass-house; in the
same way as barometer and thermometer
tubes are made in England. The tubes are
cut into very small pieces of uniform length,
on the edge of a fixed chisel; and these small
pieces are put in a heap into a mixture of fine
sand and wood ashes, in which they are
stirred about with an iron spatula, until the
cylindrical bits assume a smooth spherical
form. When removed from the fire, and
cleared out in the bore, they constitute beads.

If dolls' eyes be cheap and common— say