remarkable tact and celerity, and the blade trimmed into shape with the shears. It may serve to show the facility and fertility of their production, to say that four men will steel fifty dozen, and one man will hammer out twenty dozen a day of these great hoes. The iron is worth from £8. 10s. to £10 per ton, and the steel from 42s. to 45s. per cwt. It takes about three pounds of iron and six ounces of steel per hoe. The small coal, mostly used, costs on delivery about 7s. per ton.
I have dwelt more fully upon trowels and hoes, as the manufacture which has won for the Brades Works their especial reputation abroad. But they turn out a prodigious number of all the implements known to agricultural labour—shovels, spades, forks, garden-hoes, chaff-cutters, steel mould-boards for ploughs, and other articles of almost infinite variety and use. It may suffice to show the variety in design, shape, and size of one class of these articles to say, that the model department of the establishment contains 4,000 different patterns for straw-cutting machines, and nearly 2,000 patterns for cast-steel mould-boards for ploughs! Now, considering that, with the exception of the iron imported from Sweden for making their cast-steel, the Brades Works draw all the material they manufacture into these infinitely-varied implements from the bowels of the
