threshold of the Hyde Park Palace, we cannot
exactly say ; but the use of slate as a
pavement was excellently illustrated there ;
for it would require more millions of feet
than any calculating boy could reckon, to
press a slate pavement into holes, so close
and hard and durable is this material. The
baths and washhouses — those excellent
results of a mingling of good sense with good
feeling — exhibit very advantageously the
employment of large slabs of slate in places
where water is splashed about.

We are enamelling everything now-a-days.
We were wont, not many years back, to be
content with daguerreotypes in ordinary form,
but now we must have them enamelled. Our
boots and slippers, if blacked with the
"inestimable composition, fully equal to the
highest japan varnish, and warranted to keep
in any climate," used to content us; but now,
forsooth, they must be enamelled. Our cooks
were accustomed to value an honest iron
saucepan, or stewpan, or kettle in its
undisguised metallic state; but now it must be
veiled over with enamel. And slate used
always to be slate, pur et simple, but now it
is not unfrequently enamelled; and good
reason there is, so far as concerns iron and
slate (whatever may be said for daguerreotypes
and boots), for the adoption of this
enamelling process. Enamel is a species of
glass or glazing; it both shields the substance
beneath from chemical action, and enables it
readily to receive the adornment of colour.
Slate has come out with startling splendour
under this new mode of treatment. We have
seen slabs for a bath-room representing
various marbles inlaid after the style of
Florentine mosaic; candelabra to imitate
porphyry; a billiard-table with the legs and
frame enamelled to imitate various marbles;
a circular table with a top representing black
marble inlaid with lumachelle and jasper;
a pedestal imitative of porphyry, with a
pseudo-black marble plinth; chimney-pieces
representing black and green marbles; ink-
stands and ink-trays similarly imitative of
costly marbles. Those who profess an
intense dislike of shams may perchance
disapprove of these sham porphyries and marbles;
but it may at the same time be urged that
slate is so hard and so durable as to be better
for many purposes than any kind of marble.
Supposing beauty can be produced,
durability and cheapness are certainly obtainable;
and these three form an admirable trio; the
latter two render slate useful, while the first
renders it ornamental. It deserves also to
be borne in mind that slate is lighter than
marble, bulk for bulk. So great is the
strength imparted to slate by its lamellar
structure, that it is estimated at four times
the strength of stone flags of equal thickness;
and a slab only half an inch in thickness, even
to so great a length as eight feet, has strength
sufficient for a great variety of constructive
purposes. To enamel this substance is an art
and mystery which requires the cunning skill
of the workman with the fiery aid of a
furnace. A colouring pigment of some kind is
laid upon the slate, and this, by exposure for
several days to a temperature between three
hundred and five hundred degrees of Fahrenheit,
becomes so thoroughly burned into the
slate as to be scarcely eradicable.

When Bill Barlow breaks his slate pencil,
and invests a little capital in the purchase of
more, he does not know — and in all
probability he does not care — that the pencil is
slate as well as his slate itself; he would not
unlikely give a flat denial to such an assertion.
The schoolboy slates — those used for
writing — do not differ in any considerable
degree from roofing-slates; the quality is a
little finer in the first instance, and the
surfaces receive a careful grinding and smoothing;
the pieces are in the first place reduced
by cleavage to sheets, or leaves or films as
thin as can safely be fitted into the wooden
frames, and then the smoothing is effected.
At the quarries boys are employed in this
process of splitting the slates into thin layers,
and it is said they do the work better than
men. The kind of slate used for pencils is
much softer — it contains a little carbon,
which lessens its stony character and
increases its marking or tracing action. There
is very little lamellar or scaly structure, and
the slate can — as Bill well knows — be cut
with a knife. The pencils called Dutch are
formed of harder slate than the others, and
are fashioned into cylindrical pieces for use.

Despite what we might expect to the
contrary, slates are the most lady-like of all
mineral substances. What other can boast
of queens, and duchesses, and countesses,
and ladies — to say nothing of imperials?
The slaters tell us that a queen is three feet
long by two feet wide; that a duchess is two
feet long by one in width; that a countess is
twenty inches long by ten wide; and that a
lady, a simple lady, is sixteen inches long by
eight in width. All this is very peer-like
and heraldic; the four kinds take rank
according to their dignity in the peerage.
True, a queen would be a very Queen Dollalolla,
who should be half as broad as she is
long, like these duchesses, countesses, and
ladies; but the slate-queen presents a still
more ample ratio in width. All these ladies,
however — like the clown who has been
crushed under an enormous weight on the
stage — are remarkably thin from front to
back: regular flats, in short. And then
these ladies are subjected to square measure;
for we find that a hundred and seventy-six
countesses will only cover as much square
space as a hundred and twenty-seven duchesses,
while it requires no less than two hundred and
eighty simple ladies to cover an equal space.
We thus see how it is that the dignity of
peeresses varies as the square of their dimensions
—a law which Mr. Debrett and Mr.
Burke would never have discovered. The