the friendly bonds that restrain me. I am quiet now. I have no more to relate. My captivity is hopeless. Farewell.
DRAWING BY MACHINERY.
I had just come up from Ross—that quaint old Western town, where the salmon-traversed Wye, fresh from Plynlimmon, gambols along amongst everything that is beautiful in nature,—and was waiting at Birmingham for the Northern Evening Express. The great station in the New Street of that town, though one of the finest in the kingdom, is not, perhaps, one of the most agreeable at which to spend a spare half-hour. The din of the arriving and departing trains of the six different lines that meet there; the panting and shrieking of some dozen or two unattached engines, that prowl wistfully to and fro, as if in search of prey; and the strange reverberations of all these discordant noises high up in the arched glass-roof that stretches away for a quarter of a mile and covers everything but the two tunnelled outlets to the station, are not the pleasantest companions for an evening promenade, nor the best possible incentives to serenity of mind or continuity of thought. Nor is there much to admire in the building itself, except the engineering skill that devised so great a span of roof without the aid of intervening pillars. So, quite stunned out, and “used up,” I determined on a short stroll in the “Hardware Village” to while away the time. Setting out in prosecution of this design, I had hardly reached that peculiarly stark-looking statue of Thomas Attwood, which fronts the station-gates, when I was slapped familiarly on the back by no feeble hand; and, turning round, I recognised in my smiling assailant an old school-friend of nomadic tendencies, whom I had not met for some six or seven years. The last time I saw him, he was purser in a ship lying off Calcutta; the time before that, I think, he was engaged on a Government survey in Wales. Like most of his class, too, he had had something to do in the Crimea, during the war; had taken trips to New Zealand, China, and Japan; and, in fact, had been almost everywhere excepting to the North Pole and the Lake Nyanza.
Preliminary greetings over, therefore, my first inquiry was as to what he was doing in Birmingham.
“Well, you see, I got married about two years ago,” he replied; “and as it then became necessary that I should settle down, I took to a quiet little drawing business in this ‘great Midland Metropolis’—that is the phrase by which we modest Brums know Birmingham.”
“Drawing!” I repeated; “I did not know your tastes lay that way.”
“Nor do they, in the ordinary acceptation of the word ‘drawing,” he said, with the suspicion of a twinkle of fun in his eye; “but the fact is, I draw by machinery. I hate that dreary old hard work, you know.”
“Surely, you do not mean that you have settled down as a photographer?”
“O no,” he replied, laughing at my evident perplexity; “something far more lucrative than that. By the way, didn’t you see any of my work in the Exhibition?”
“No, not to my knowledge.”
“You must have seen it, my boy; I had tons of it there. However, just run up to my studio and I’ll show you some.”
I explained to him that I could not do so then, but promised to call and see him on my return from Windermere.”
“Well,” he replied, “if you like to run up and spend a few weeks with us, we shall be delighted to give you welcome; but pray, do not come for the purpose of seeing any of my works of art, or you’ll be disappointed. To tell you the truth, I am a wire-drawer—a most interesting and important manufacture I assure you. You should see the trade-circular I drew up for the American market; that will give you an insight into the uses of wire. It took me weeks to do it, but I flatter myself it’s the thing. Just listen; I know it all by heart. ‘Who,’ it asks, ‘has ever seriously thought of the inconveniences that would attend a sudden annihilation of that simple commodity called wire? To suppose the infant world deprived of its pins, and the feminine world of its hooks and eyes and bonnet-wire, were to suppose a disordered state of dress in those we love shocking to contemplate; and to suppose the home circle’—that’s a good term, isn’t it?—‘deprived of its fire-guards, were to suppose Paterfamilias driven to dispense altogether with his fires and the comforts thereof, on pain of allowing his wife and daughters to become burnt-offerings to fashion. And, then, who has knowledge to say to what extent the mysteries of cooking depend upon contrivances in wire, or what in point of convenience could replace our house-bell system? But for wire, too, the pianos of our daughters would cease to charm away the cares of business in the evening, and spring-chairs would no more soothe us into after-dinner slumbers. The only tenants of our houses, indeed, to whom the annihilation of wire would not come as a misfortune, would be our prisoned songbirds, with, here and there, a giddy squirrel doomed to run forever the narrow circuit of his barrel-cage.’ All this, you see, gives the matter a domestic interest,—now listen: “But taking a broader view of the matter, and travelling out of our homes for a while, we shall find wire in use almost everywhere,—sometimes as a convenience, oftener as an essential. It is the highway along which our telegraphic messages are flashed with a swifter speed than lightning—the agent by which signals are turned on and off, and life preserved on our railways. In our manufactories it releases hundreds of tons of steam-power at a touch; enters into a thousand processes; binds up the products of British industry for shipment to all parts of the world. Twisted, it deposits the miner safely in the bowels of the earth; worked into gauze, it protects him there. Without it, electricity could scarcely be evolved for any useful purpose; to it chemistry owes many valuable discoveries and delicate tests. It is employed, in short, in most arts and some sciences, and may be found in almost every piece of mechanism in existence—from a rat-trap to a gold chronometer, from a child’s toy to a