pass his days in the populous and struggling hives of the world's industry, shall in vain attempt to realize? That family reunion which the ploughman-poet has depicted with so much natural force and beauty-the joyful gathering of the children on the eve of the sabbath, when, released from weekly service, each filial heart hastens to the home fire-side, "perhaps to show a bra' new gown," or, with equal pleasure, to bring the "Sair-won penny fee, To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be' the pleasant meeting of brothers and sisters, and the innocent chat upon all that they have seen and done since they parted last-the artless Jenny and her modest true-love, who lingers without the cottage, "till she with kindly welcome brings him ben"-the good old cautious mother, who can see well enough "what makes the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave,' being well pleased to see it nevertheless-the mirth of the younkers, and the grave rejoinders of the father, who seasons all with admonition due "the cheerful supper of porridge, and then the circle of serious faces round the ingle, listening in solemn silence while the aged sire turns over the big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride," and, unbonneting his gray hairs, reads reverently, "How Abram was the friend of God on high; or, perhaps, if the Christian volume is the theme, "How he who in lone Patmos banished, Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand, fare leading from the Blackfriars-road to the Westminster-bridge-road, and which is known by the name of the New-cut, and its continuation, the Lambeth-marsh, as far as where the Marsh gate once stood. This locality, always the focus and centre of a very peculiar description of commerce, is seen in its greatest glory on a fine Saturday night. It is then the especial resort of working men and their wives and families, who, in crowds, bend their steps thither as to a mart where everything can be purchased which they can possibly require, and where anything is to be had for almost any amount of money they can afford to give for it. The southern side of the New-cut is, moreover, the El Dorado of the bargain-hunter, and furnishes him not merely with the necessaries but the luxuries of life, as well as with an almost infinite variety of things which are neither the one nor the other, at the lowest imaginable price. Before we commence our Saturday evening stroll, we must briefly des cribe one or two of the distinguishing features of the district, for the benefit of those among our numerous readers who have never had the opportunity of visiting one of the not least remarkable spectacles of this busy metropolis. Entering the New-cut from the Blackfriarsroad, and keeping on the left-hand side, we first pass some common-place looking private dwellings and ordinary shops, and then come to a series of shops of a rather singular class and pretension. Unlike the shopkeepers in the first-class business thoroughfares of London, who delight in needless displays of plate-glass and burnished brass, the And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounced by Heaven's proprietors of these places tear away the whole command" the psalm from simple voices, and the simple petition, when, kneeling down, "the saint, the father, and the husband prays," that thus, in the sight of God, the family may be finally reunited in heaven, -these are scenes to which, so far as our observation goes, there are but few parallels to be found in the experiences of the poor of crowded cities on Saturday nights. It was from the prevalence of such simple and touching piety beneath her humblest roofs, that Burns prophesied for his country the continuance of a << virtuous populace," who might "stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle." Among his countrymen, in his day at least, the Saturday night was, what it ever ought to be, a season of rest and tranquil enjoyment in preparation for a sabbath dedicated exclusively to the services of religion. Things are very different indeed in our day and on our side of the border. How different, the reader will have an opportunity of judging when he has perused to the end of this paper. We purpose, not for the sake of comparing notes, for there is nothing comparable to be found in the two pictures, but for the sake of gleaning something from the contrast, to take a stroll among the haunts of the poor and labouring classes when Saturday night releases them from the toil of the week, and lets them loose in the streets of London, with money in their pockets and freedom from labour at least till Monday morning. We cannot select a better locality for our visit than the long, populous, and trafficking thorough window-front and abolish it altogether. The entire frontage of every house is open from the first-floor to the ground, the wall of the mansion being supported by iron pillars. A good proportion of the dealers are furniture-brokers, who pile their wares in heterogeneous confusion, and push, in fine wea ther, a good portion of them into the street. These wares are not warranted to last longer than the national debt, and if we say they are as good as can be manufactured for the money that will be taken for them, we give them their full meed of praise and something over. But, besides the furniture shops, there are others of a very characteristic description, which have been in existence some of them for a quarter of a century, and have conferred upon the New-cut the reputation it enjoys as the depository of everything which has a name or a use, or which may want both, and yet be in a condition to figure as a bargain. These omnium-gatherum shops will repay the spectator the trouble of a momentary scrutiny. Upon a series of benches, or little platforms rising one above another, are thrown a strange compound of multitudinous wares in a medley of most admired confusion and disorder. It would be hardly possible to fix upon a single portable commodity of which a specimen may not from time to time be found among these wares, inasmuch as everything that can be purchased elsewhere, as well as a vast quantity of articles which no one else would think of exhibiting for sale, are occasionally to be found here, from a grand pianoforte afflicted with bronchitis to a cartwheel, whose felloe has foundered upon the road, or "from a flat-iron to a diamond-ring," as the owners phrase it. Upon cut. Crossing the Waterloo-road, we enter upon one shelf you shall see a microscope elbowing a Lambeth-marsh, a somewhat narrower thoroughstone-filter-a German-flute cheek-by-jowl with a fare, abounding in shops of unpretentious aspect, brace of pistols--a medicine-chest and a Kentucky but well stocked with every variety of wares suitbowie-knife-a pair of spectacles and a pair of box-able for the class of customers mostly frequenting ing-gloves-a rolling-pin and a wooden leg-a the neighbourhood. Here, throughout the week, warming-pan and a patent refrigerator. Upon there is nothing very remarkable to be seen; but another crazy board, fenders, gridirons, and roast- on the Saturday night, the five or six feet of soil ing-jacks are beheld sprawling harmlessly among next the kerb-stone on both sides of the way, cheap specimens of tawdry crockery and stopper- and for nearly the whole length of the road, is meless decanters; and upon a third there are spades, tamorphosed into the Poor Man's Market for Propickaxes, and shovels, together with the hymn- visions. The dealers, a good many of them Irishbooks of Watts and Wesley, prayer-books, and women, pitch their temporary stalls, hand-carts, church services. A card of gold breast-pins leans and baskets, close to the edge of the pavement. against a cast from the Elgin marbles; there are They drive a commerce of very various character. bottles of physic and packets of patent medicines The women sell fish, fresh (P) or salt-cod, hadjumbled together with bottles of mouldy pickles, docks, salmon, Yarmouth bloaters, mackarel, and of anchovies, and Day and Martin's blacking; herrings, with sometimes shrimps or sprats; but there are lustres, half of whose crystal drops have the grand staple of their trade is vegetables, which dropped off, and lutes minus their strings, and they purchase at a low price at Covent-garden logs of rosewood and mahogany rough from the market, at a late hour of the day, clearing off what timber stores. There are clogs and pattens, and the more respectable buyers have rejected. Close drawings in water-colour, and artificial flowers; to a stall of vegetables, perhaps, you will see the inkstands and painted flower-pots, and a multitude shining stock-in-trade of a working tinman glitof indescribables besides, appealing to every eye tering upon the ground, and consisting of sauceand to every pocket, however scantily furnished. pans and kettles of every capacity; together with The general aspect of these wares is very much Dutch-ovens, grates, cullenders, and roasting-jacks, modified by demands which arise at particular which the presiding owner assures you were all seasons of the year. When the angling mania manufactured by his own hands, of the best matecommences-an insanity which seizes the youth of rial. Next to him stands a tall fellow, steadying a Cockaigne every recurring spring-forth comes a monster umbrella inverted, in the hollow cavity of forest of fishing-rods of all lengths and all prices, which he has spread some hundreds of copperfrom five feet in longitude to five-and-twenty, and plate engravings, from which you may select any from sixpence to a guinea. When the winter's number you like, for the small charge of one farfrost has set in, and the ice in the parks is strong thing each. Then comes a stand of crockery; enough to bear the sign-board marked "danger- then one of oysters, or whelks, or pickled eels and ous"-which the Londoner seems to regard as an salmon; and then a handbarrow piled with sweetinvitation to disport himself on the ice-then the smelling flowers, at a halfpenny a bunch. Here an whole shop bursts into the causeway surcharged industrious fellow sits on the ground weaving with a plethora of skates. If, lost in admiration toasting-forks from brass and iron wire by the the discordant variety of merchandise, you cast light of a single candle; and there another carves your eyes to the ceiling, you may chance to find it ornamental fire-screens from a plank of pine with festooned with second-hand fiddles, while the walls a rapidity puzzling to comprehend. Besides these are hung with home-made Raphaels, Rembrandts, and other privileged squatters who regularly ocand Correggios at seven-and-sixpence per pair. If cupy the ground, there are a host of peripatetic you edge your way, as you may easily do if you merchants loaded with portable commodities, and like, through the narrow side passage into the rear plying for customers among the gathering crowd. of this astonishing display, you may come upon a Boys not ten years of age assail you to buy their library of old books heaped in solid stacks, and last bunch of onions for two-pence: these urchins stifled in dust, where, if you have no particular are always selling their last bunch, as they have objection to dirt, you may rummage among the but capital enough to purchase one at a time lamber of by gone literature, till you look like a when they sell a lot, they realize a halfpenny mummy routing in a pyramid. Tools of every towards the Sunday's dinner, and immediately imaginable description, blocks of marble, lumps of purchase another from Irish Moll at the corner. metal, old copper-plates, fragments of machines of Others are bawling gridirons at a penny apiece, various sorts, coffee-mills and grind-stones, furni- and others again are playing lively tunes upon tin ture old and new, and musical instruments of all whistles, which they retail to aspiring musicians at dates and in all stages of dilapidation, lie about on the same price. all sides in most admired disorder. On Saturday night, these tempting museums are lighted up both within and without by flaring gas-burners, and it is then that they are specially haunted by working mechanics and artisans in search of some cheap tool, or perhaps of a musical instrument, or a book, or some domestic luxury or ornament within reach of their slender funds. These omnium-gatherum bazaars, interspersed with the shops of the furniture-brokers, extend a considerable way on the south side of the New Retracing our steps, and returning up the north side of the New-cut, we enter upon a new variety of the Saturday night's commerce. The south side is very much devoted to the luxuries of life, specious and crippled and second-hand luxuries though they be, some of them; the north side is almost exclusively engrossed by the indispensable necessaries of the human lot. Though men and women may at a pinch do without books and pictures, and, when the pinch grows very severe, even without chairs and tables, fenders and fire-irons, they yet : cannot do without " pantaloons and boddices,” and hats or caps, and boots or shoes. In this quarter of the New-cut all such requisites are to be found, as well, too, as all such savoury and saccharine ingredients as furnish the breakfast board, or the dinner table. Together with the grocer and the butcher, here we find the slopseller, the hatter, and the ready-made and already worn-out shoe-seller. Here are coats, and vests, and leggings for gentlemen, and spectral gowns with outstretched arms for the ladies. At the first view all these wares appear in a manner mingled together under one long tent. This appearance is due to the custom prevailing among the shopkeepers of thrusting their goods into the street. With the exception of the provision dealers, all do this; and as their merchandise would suffer irreparable damage from rain, it is all covered in by ample awnings of canvass, which protect it alike from the rays of the sun and the peltings of the storm. We need hardly say that there are gin-shops and public-houses in very sufficient abundance scattered throughout the whole district, as well as their inseparable companions and coadjutors, the pawnbrokers. Let the above suffice for a glance at the neighbourhood and its commerce; we propose now to follow the poor man and his wife into the market, when it is at its height, and to keep an eye upon their proceedings. John and Mary Jones are a youthful couple who have been married just three months. Both are born Londoners, and well enough acquainted with life to drive a bargain in a London market. They are fond of each other, and, for aught we know, have no reason to be otherwise. John is a good workman and Mary a good manager; if there is but little sentiment between them, it may be the fault of their education and of their surroundings, which have not been calculated to foster sentiment. When John first "breathed out his tender tale" to Mary, it was not "beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale," but under a doorway beneath which the pair were driven by a shower of rain, as he was escorting her home from the bookbinder's where she wrought as a folder for seven-and-sixpence a week. The tender tale was, however, just as much to the purpose as though the milk-white thorn had waved over their heads instead of the sign of the golden teapot, and the treaty then and there ratified by the light of a gaslamp was kept with as good faith as any ever made by the light of the moon, and witnessed by all the stars in the sky. Since that eventful night, three months of courtship have been followed by three more of matrimony. The young couple have at last resolved upon doing now what they ought to have done before they yoked together; that is, to furnish a nest of their own, and to get clear of ready-furnished lodgings, which they begin to find as comfortless as they are needlessly expensive. With this view, Mary has been back to work at the binder's, and John has been labouring over-hours for the last month, and saving every penny he could spare to buy sticks." It was past nine o'clock to-night before he got away from the workshop-and now he and Mary are come to the market, with the double view of replenishing the cupboard for the morrow's consumption, and of laying out a pound 66 or two in substituting for the household goods of his landlady, household goods of his own. Mary has a little basket on her arm and the street-door key in her bosom, and she would rather get the provisioning done out of the way, before it grows later, and while there is plenty to choose from. She is brought to a stand by the explosive "Buy! buy! what d'ye buy ?" of the butcher, and looks around upon his stall for the precise little cut of beef which will do hot for one day's and cold for another dinner. There it is, sure enough, hanging on the third hook. 66 "How is beef to day, Mr. —?" she asks. Pretty well, thankee, ma'am ; how are you?" "Pooh! none of that nonsense!" "Beg pardon, ma'am, sevenpence-halfpennysevenpence to you." "Well, weigh me that piece." "That! well to be sure, what a eye yur got. I put that piece up there for my own dinner tomorrer: but you shall have it-three pounds, you see, good weight; one and nine-thankee, sir; now then, buy! buy! buy! what d'ye buy ?” The beef is in the basket, wrapped in a clean cloth, and Mary pops into the grocer's, where she would have to wait a long while, but that John elbows a way for her to the counter. Having secured her tea and sugar and a little pat of butter, she directs her steps towards the Marsh in search of vegetables. It is now past ten o'clock, and the throng is very dense and growing momentarily more so. It is difficult to get along upon the pavement owing to the crowd, and those who are in a hurry take to the road to save time. Vegetables are plentiful and cheap enough: Mary, who took John's heart in his breast as a thing for granted, has no such confidence in the case of cabbages; she rends open their green waistcoats and has ocular demonstration that the hearts are there before she pays her coppers for them. Irish Moll's onions get a pretty hard pinch between her taper finger and thumb, and one bunch after another is rejected before she is suited to her mind. Then there is nothing more to be got but a bag of flour from the baker's, where the best wheaten bread is ticketed at 6d. the quartern, delivered full weight from the scale, and a lump of salt bought for a halfpenny from a boy hawker in the street. The demands of appetite being provided for, the pair have now leisure for an hour's promenade among the furniture shops and nondescript museums, where all manner of tempting bargains lie in wait for their slender purse. [TO BE CONTINUED.] BIRMINGHAM AND HER MANUFACTURES. MESSES. OSLER'S ESTABLISHMENT. THE crystal fountain which occupied the centre of the transept in the Great Exhibition will be fresh in the recollection of a considerable portion of our readers. We are going now to spend an hour at the establishment of the Messrs. Osler in Broadstreet, by whom that noble contribution to the grandest spectacle of any age was manufactured. Passing through the show-rooms, glittering on all Of course in this daguerreotype sketch the character of the tradesman is painted as it is, not as we would wish it to be. sides with the most exquisite forms in crystal, and abounding in a profusion of beautiful objects reflecting all the hues of the rainbow, from the pendulous chandeliers with massive glittering drops to the richly-cut vessels that figure on the sideboards of the aristocracy, we follow the footsteps of our guide to the works below. Before recording what we see, however, it will be necessary to premise that the finishing portion only of the manufacture is carried on in these premises, and we must therefore, for the sake of the reader, briefly describe the preparatory processes as we have witnessed them elsewhere. The glass of which lustres, decanters, and domestic glass ware are made is known as flint glass, and it differs in the proportions of its ingredients from both crown and plate glass. It is, however, melted and refined in the furnace in a similar manner, is drawn from thence in the same way upon the ends of hollow tubes, and is moulded to the required form by the manual dexterity of the workman. We will suppose, for the sake of a simple illustration, that a man is going to make a water-bottle for the toilet-table, and we will suppose, too, though that is never the case, that one man accomplishes the whole of the business. He first dips the end of a long iron tube into the pot in the furnace, and twisting it round two or three times, collects a small portion of the metal, but sufficient for his purpose, on the end. He then withdraws his tube, and swings it a few times round his head to lengthen the red-hot mass. He then rolls it on a flat slab, and blows into it to make it hollow; these operations he repeats more than once if necessary, until he has got it to his mind. He now seats himself on a stool, and, with a boy in attendance, who, at his bidding, blows through the tube and increases the capacity of the vessel, he commences rolling the tube backwards and forwards horizontally upon the arm of his seat, a level bar of iron. Keeping the rod continually revolving with his left hand, which preserves the rotundity of the vessel, with his right hand, by the aid of a small iron tool, he flattens the bottom of the bottle, occasionally heating it in the fire until it is perfectly formed. When this is done, he attaches the foot or bottom of the article to another rod of iron by means of a little of the molten glass, sundering it from the tube by the bare touch of a cold tool. He now heats it again for a moment, and proceeds with the formation of the neck with its raised bands, and the lip. If he have too much glass, he cuts away a portion with a pair of scissors; the lip is curved over and flattened to the required shape in a few seconds, and by inserting his modelling tool through the orifice as the glass is rapidly revolving, he can give it readily any form or any capacity that he chooses. It is in a manner very similar to this that decanters, rummers, and glass vessels of all descriptions are formed. If they require handles or feet, they are formed from separate pieces of metal attached to them while they are hot, and immediately modelled into shape by the operator. So soon as they are formed, they are put into an annealing oven, where they are first exposed to a high temperature, and then suffered to cool by degrees, without which process they would be too brittle for use, or, if they needed cutting, would perish under the operation. All processes of this kind are performed by the Messrs. Osler at works situated out of the town, such articles only as are designed for ornamentation being finished at the workshops in Broadstreet. The glass, moreover, from which the lustres, candelabra, etc., are made, is prepared and refined at the suburban works, and is brought to Broad-street, in the form of stout, clear, circular bars, to be re-manufactured. In the first room to which we were introduced, a workman was seated at the mouth of a furnace, by the heat of which these bars of metal are reduced to a semi-fluid state. He was engaged in pressing the red-hot metal, after examining it minutely and picking out any impurities yet remaining, in an iron mould shaped like a broad pair of pincers, which he held in his right hand. Laying a strip of the metal, melted to the consistence of soft putty, in the open mould, he had only to clasp the handles of the pincers together to produce a rough naped prismatic drop six inches in length. Of these he could manufacture a considerable number in the course of an hour, and, by changing the mould, could of course impress various forms upon the yielding glass. In the next room we came upon a group of young girls employed in grinding the flat surfaces of these prisms upon slabs of stone sprinkled with sand and water. These drops, as well as all imitative crystals, have to undergo several grindings; the first merely reduces them to shape, the second to smoothness, the third to a partial polish, and the fourth, or polishing process, to a pure and spotless transparency. Glass-cutting, as most of our readers know, is accomplished by grinding the surface of the glass upon wheels of various-shaped edges and of different diameters. We now pass into the cutting-rooms, where the glass-cutters, busy at their moist and dripping trade, are seated in a row, each in front of a rapidly revolving wheel, kept in motion by steam power. Over most of the wheels rude funnel-shaped leaky vessels, dripping sand and water, hang suspended. The wheels are of different sizes and formed of materials of varying degrees of hardness, from cast-iron down to willow-wood, and they can be readily changed and shifted at the will of the workman. The men are engaged at very different kinds of work: one, working at a wheel shaped like the edge of a triangular file, is cutting deep channels in the body of a decanter; a second, using a flat wheel, is reducing the plain cylinder of another into a polygon of some twenty sides; a third, whose wheel has a convex edge, is cutting concave trenches; while a fourth, whose wheel is hardly two inches in diameter, is cutting the representation of a flower upon a wine-glass. This last process is properly called engraving in glass, and from the extreme care it requires in the operation is necessarily one of great expense. It is impossible to conceive a more awkward and hopeless mode of working out his design than that which the artist in glass has to deal with; instead of a flat surface, upon which he can trace and correct his outline, he has a round and transparent surface upon which an outline cannot be marked; and, instead of a pencil or a graving tool wherewith to work, he has nothing but a whizzing wheel to which he must apply the surface of his picture for every fresh touch. When the designs to be |