mometer frequently stood at 35 degrees below zero, and during the whole journey of from twenty to thirty days they passed only two settlements. However, in spite of snow and ice, they arrived at last at their destination, and were received with open arms by the Anadyrskians. On the Sunday after Christmas Day the priest gave in their honour a grand ball, to which all the inhabitants of the four villages composing the township of Anadyrsk were invited. The manner of conducting this festive meeting was sufficiently curious to deserve a record.

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The proceedings commenced by the consumption of a vast amount of raw frozen cranberries and fish; and then the orchestra consisting of two violins, two guitars, and a huge comb covered with a piece of in a manner familiar to all boys-struck up a lively Russian dance. At this signal a man dressed in a spotted deerskin coat and buckskin pantaloons sprang into the centre of the room, and, beginning with the lady nearest him, danced in succession with every lady present. As partner succeeded partner, the dancing became more and more furious, until "suddenly the man dropped down on his stomach on the floor at the feet of his partner, and began jumping around, like a huge broken-legged grasshopper, upon his elbows and the ends of his toes." This was his final effort, and he eventually retired, with the perspiration rolling down his cheeks, to refresh himself with more cranberries. Various dances now succeeded, and as no man retired to eat cranberries until he had danced with every lady in the room, the night was not an idle one.-Saturday Review.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

AN EVENING WITH THE PENCIL-MAKERS. [THE following extract is given as a description of one of the thousand arts to which the commercial prosperity of our country is due.]

A FEW evenings since, accompanied by Mr. Woolf the proprietor, we paid a visit to the old palace (once occupied by Queen Anne) which stands in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's-Inn Fields. No palace-guard watches the gate, no sounds of martial music strike the ear of the visitor, but a fresh and pleasant odour comes wafted on the breeze as the portal turns on its hinges-an odour suggestive of new drawing-pencils and recently-made cigar-boxes-an odour from which the most determined clothes-moth would fly as from the jaws of a hungry bat. Cedar, from the huge and massive logs just brought from the forests of Florida, to tiny shavingchips, and almost impalpable dust, reigns supreme in the old palace, vice Queen Anne, deceased. In short, the very atmosphere you breathe is redolent of the Queen of the Conifers.*

Passing between goodly piles of hewn timber of rich reddish hue, we enter a chamber, in which we come upon boards, planks, logs, and massive square bars, all of cedar. Here the long bright pit-saw travels untiringly up and down, until the ponderous tree-trunk is cleft from end to end, and the work of the burrowing worm or hidden defect in the wood is laid bare-for no faulty or even knotted timber is made use of in the manufacture of drawing-pencils. We see the selected material cut into small square blocks, and we follow one of them to a bright iron bench, where a shadowy-looking disc goes humming round with bewildering speed. The block is placed on the bench and pressed forwards.

*Trees which bear cones.

The disc sings a short snatch of a clear ringing song: a little square flat board falls from the block; another and another steel song is sung. The circular saw treats the block much as a cook treats a cucumber, and a pile of little flat square boards and a heap of sawdust is the result of the saw's labours. We pick up one of these little boards, which we find is about 7 inches long, 4 inches wide, and three-eighths of an inch thick. This, although apparently quite flat and uniform in thickness, is not actually so. It is therefore pushed into a sort of mechanical post-office, where, after passing under the blades of a cylindrical cutter which revolves too rapidly to be seen and hums like an enraged hornet, it is cast snappishly out with a surface ast smooth as glass.

We pick up our board and go with it to another circular saw, where it is cut into oblong slips, whilst a fellowboard is cut into a set of slips of less thickness; we lay one slip on the other, and a perfect square bar is the result. These two slips are called, respectively, the "top" and the "bottom," the bottom being the stoutest of the two. We follow the fortunes of our two slips, and see the bottom thrust end-foremost into the open mouth of a greedy-looking little gnome of a machine, which bites it, gives it a sort of tilt upwards, and casts it out again-when we discover that our slip has a deep square groove running about three-fourths of its length. We lay our two slips carefully aside, and go in search of that which has in good time to fill the grooves which the gnome's steel teeth have bitten:

Conducted by Mr. Woolf, we proceed to where rich stores of graphite or "blacklead " are laid up. Ceylon, Bohemia, Spain, and Cumberland, have all contributed their quota to these ebon-black treasure-coffers. Cumberland graphite, however, bears away the palm from all the rest in point of quality. We inquire about the supply of this production, and are informed that it is

very scanty; but, as the firm obtained about £7000 worth some time since, they will not be very anxious about Cumberland until. matters begin to look unpromising in that quarter.

We now follow the fortunes of a lump of "Cumberland lead"--a substance, by-the-bye, which is not even related to lead in any way, being a combination of iron and carbon. One lump of graphite, although pure in appearance, contains minute particles of grit; so it is with several other lumps, large and small, cast on a circular iron bed, where a ponderous granite wheel travels its endless round, and crushes all it encounters into powder. Some of this we follow, and see it cast into a vessel of water and then stirred up; when the stirrer is removed, the grit falls to the bottom, whilst a syphon draws off all the fine particles remaining in suspension, and assorts them according to their quality and minuteness of divi

sion.

Here we see a distinction drawn between the highestclass graphite, or that intended for the best description of drawing-pencils, and a second quality used in the production of pencils of the ordinary kind.

The high-class material we see being rattled about in steam-driven sieves of marvellous fineness, ground, pulverised, dried, and elaborated, until it is converted into dust of the most impalpable character. We obtain a scoopful of it, which we place on one side, whilst we see the second quality stuff, ground in water, converted into a paste, then enveloped in cloths like so much blacklead cheese, pressed in a screw-press, where water clear as crystal flows from it.

We now see our cheese placed in a machine, which at once converts it into yards of square blacklead vermicelli; this, as it coils forth, is nipped into convenient lengths, and laid on a grooved board. This board we bear, in company with our scoop of dry powder, far down into the dungeon and torture department, where

we see our neat row of blacklead rods placed in a little box luted fast with clay, and placed in a fiery furnace to bake. Then with our scoop we travel on to where our powder has to meet its trials. We see it seized on by a very black familiar, who with a funnel pours it into a round steel box or block; this, when placed beneath the screw of a powerful press, has a sort of rammer or compressor fitted to it, which, as the levers turn, compresses our powder into a compass far less than we could have imagined possible. Still the screwpress has inflicted a mere trifling.squeeze compared with that which follows, when the steel box, after being fortified with huge hollow cases of steel, is placed within the giant grip of an immense hydraulic ram.

The familiar now becomes active to a remarkable degree; up and down travels the lever, until it will move no more: then a much longer lever is fitted on: up and down it travels again, until the iron screw of the tap cannot be forced into the compressed water it contains. We tremble for our poor powder when we are informed that about nine thousand tons are pressing on it. At length, however, At length, however, when the pressure is removed, we see it come bravely out of the ordeal, no longer powder, but in the form of a perfect cube of jet -solid, bright, hard, and worth twenty-one shillings. By the time this has been sawn by hand into thin flat slabs, our blacklead worms are baked enough; so we secure one of them, and travel back floor after floor to where we left our little cedar top and bottom after the groove had been bitten in it. Now we pay a visit to a department where, by the aid of glue, the edge of the slab is fitted to the groove; a stroke on each side with a sharp needle-like instrument causes the slab to clip off, leaving a portion of the length of the groove filled; a second fitting, two more scratches with the needle, and the groove is full.

On we travel to another room, where our lead-worm