down the street. He drives a vehicle, looking like a stage-coach crossed by a waggon, whose long, windowless body is painted red and whose wheels are bright yellow. The dusty machine is hung, externally, with brooms, brushes and baskets, while inside it is stuffed with tinware, dry goods and "notions." At the rear, swing great bundles of feathers and rags, for the tin-pedlar barters upon occasion and, so far as rags are concerned; is the chief purveyor of the New England paper-makers. The fellow in question has the face of a doubledistilled Yankee and wears a stove-pipe hat, made of tin and painted red, while his answer to our hail informs us that he carries a clever tongue which can be persuasive or brazen, as occasion requires. He is evidently returning after a long expedition, for he is not keen to do business and, watching his tired horses stumbling along the rough roadway, we think of him respectfully as one of the few old things in America, a survival in the country where scarcely anything survives the passage of the car of progress.

The Waterbury Clock Company's factory is a veritable palace of industry. The building is dignified, if not handsome, in appearance and, as usual in America, specially designed for the purpose to which it is applied. It is spacious enough for the future extension of business, convenient for work and comfortable in all its arrangements, both for master and man.

The New England manufacturer has no notion of

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spending the greater part of his day in a dirty, illfurnished, ill-ventilated room, or, indeed, of asking his book-keepers to do so On the contrary, he houses his staff in large, handsome rooms, fitted with many clever devices for facilitating work, from among which the telephone is never absent. Most of his clerks are girls, who also conduct the correspondence, using the type-writer almost universally for this purpose. The offices are kept scrupulously neat and clean and their occupants are distinguished by an air of briskness very different to that which characterizes their duller brethren of the desk in England. The workshops, again, are so comfortable, and the operatives so like the masters in ideas and manners, that an Englishman is altogether, but very agreeably, surprised on his first introduction to a Yankee factory.

Gloze it over as we may, there is a great gulf fixed between the ideas of Old and New England on this radical question of the dignity of work. Our industrial occupations consist, speaking generally, of mere moneyspinning. The places where, and the people by whom, we carry them on, are cared for economically, and that is all. It is not in our business, but by our "position," that we shine in the eyes of ourselves and our neighbours. The social code of this country drives, yearly, numbers of young men, issuing from our public schools and universities, either into the over-crowded learned professions or into government clerkships, whose narrow

round of irresponsible duties benumbs originality and weakens self-reliance. Capable, educated girls are pining for a "career" in England, while posts, even the most important, are filled in New England by "young ladies," the equals of ours in everything which that phrase denotes and their superiors in all the qualities. that are born of effort and self-help. It is no one's fault, and I am not going to rail at the inevitable. We were originally a feudal country and cannot escape the influence of our traditions. The man who does service for another was a "villein" in the feudal times and is an "inferior" now; just as a man of no occupation is a "gentleman," and a governess a "person." Use has made us unconscious of the fact that the "dignity of work" is a mere phrase in our mouths, while it blinds us to the loss of national energy which avenges outraged labour.

I sat, one day early last September, under the razor of a strange barber, when my gossip, wishing to please, said, "You had a fine day for the partridges on the first, sir, this year." Now, if I like trout-fishing on occasion, there is certainly nothing of the sportsman about my appearance, but this Nello of the Burlington Arcade, with his eye on a tip, thought he knew how to tickle me; for do not all his customers like to be considered members of the idle classes? And being human, they cannot help it. The roots of our civilization were laid in feudality, although they have branched into freedom, but the tree has yet to bear the flower of equality. Hence, we remain

a race of castes, whose boundary lines are so rigid as to be, at present, impassable. The "upper" and "lower strata of society, the idle and industrial classes, indeed, cannot amalgamate, for they are separated by differences so profound that contact between them must be attended either by servility or hostility. Centuries of inequality have so degraded labour that its ranks are now effectually barred to culture, and our golden youth is squandered while we wait for the renascence of industry.

Matters are very different in New England. The owners of these brass-mills and clock-shops are proud of that industry which-not only with their lips, but by their lives-they honour. Their operatives, with whom one dines at every. Hodgkiss House in the Naugatuck valley, are well educated, well mannered and intelligent companions, hopeful as to their own chances of success in life, satisfied to see cleverer men than themselves growing rich and honouring industry, because they, the children of industry, are honoured.

But I am moralizing outside the factory, while my readers are anxious to go within. Having passed through the cheerful offices and admired the trim girl-clerks, our attention is pointedly drawn to a new system of fire-prevention, now coming into use throughout manufacturing New England. These mountain towns are well supplied with water, whose pressure is high and supply constant. A network of pipes, in connection with the town mains, is fixed to every ceiling in the factory, the

pipes themselves being furnished with "sprinklers," or roses, each of which commands a space of about ten feet square. The plugs are closed by fusible metal, which melts at a temperature of a hundred and fifty degrees, giving vent, in case of danger, to a rush of water sufficient to extinguish any incipient fire. As a concurrent effect of any one of these plugs melting, an alarm-bell is set violently ringing, the whole arrangement being perfectly automatic and always ready for action.

The chief mechanical agent employed in making cheap clocks is the punch, a tool which has been brought to an extraordinary state of perfection, in Connecticut. Wheel blanks are stamped out by it about as fast as one can comfortably count. These are clamped together, sixty at a time, on a spindle which, being turned round step by step, exposes the edges of the blanks to the action of a rotary cutter, grooving out four hundred teeth in a minute. The clock spindles, or "pivots," are turned in tiny lathes, whose tools, although held in the hand, are furnished with stops which determine the lengths and diameters of the work, independently of the operator. The separate pieces are taken upstairs from the punch and lathe to be "assembled," and after this operation, which is an affair of a few minutes only in respect of a single clock, the finished "movements" are placed in a tray standing beside the workman. Each tray holds a hundred and fifty movements and, when full,