district. So we felt a little embarrassed by his very civilities in intimating a wish to know the morale of his employées. Indeed, he seemed to be taken a little aback when we asked what proportion of them could read. He evidently had never stopped to ask that question of himself and could not answer it for us. When Capern suggested that the new Factory Act would probably bring the subject of the education of the children he employed before him, in a new light, he replied with much apparent satisfaction that the Act would not affect him, as it applied to ornamental brick-making, and that he had discontinued that branch of the business. As we were leaving the last moulding shed we visited, a little boy came up to the bench who was but a little taller than one of its legs. I asked him his age, and was surprised when he said he was seventeen. I almost mechanically put my umbrella up against him, and found he exceeded its length by full nine inches; so that he must have been quite three feet and a half on his bare feet although he at first looked shorter. He probably had found no other time to grow except when a-bed at night or on the Sunday. This enterprising manufacturer makes the hardest and best bricks to be found in the market. The canal passes close to his kilns on one side and the railway on the other; so that he has ready
