after wheel, from the coarsest stone to the closest grained leather, until, if it be a blade, it becomes keen and dazzling, or, if it be a handle, it becomes smooth and glossy as glass. And now having seen the blades and handles separately prepared, let us pass on to see them put together.
“But your knife,” says the reader, “has more than blades and handle; it has a file and a button-hook, a gimlet, a corkscrew, a saw, and I don’t know how many more useful tools.”
Well, we have seen how the file was made. The saw was forged and ground, and its teeth were produced by filing. But I am sure you would not like to go within hearing distance even of the shop where saw-teeth are filed—that dreadful “screech, scrych, skri-ik” of the files is excruciating. How the workmen endure it all their lives I cannot understand. Then, as to the corkscrew—that was simply a piece of tapered steel wire wound two or three times round a small cylinder, and then pulled out lengthwise. The gimblet was a thicker piece of steel wire, grooved at the end, and twisted to a point while hot. The other implements were either too simple in construction to need description, or were not made at such works as these. The putting together of the several parts to form one whole knife is, as may be well imagined, the simplest process of all. One man drills holes through the various materials, another rivets the bone, or horn, or pearl to a thin plate of steel or brass; and a third rivets the handles and blades, and such other accessories as may be necessary, together. The knife is then passed on to the final polishers and burnishers—generally women—and is then ready for the market.
A Sheffield pocket-knife, therefore, passes through many hands before it is complete; there is a division of labour in its manufacture that has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages are, that each man, spending a lifetime in one branch of the trade only, is a better workman in that particular branch than another who has divided his attention amongst three or four branches. And thus it comes to pass that Sheffield cutlers are famous, above all others who do not make a similar division of labour, for the excellency of their manufactures. But out of this same division of labour there arises a grievous evil. Every class of workman is necessary to the making of a knife. If the drillers cease to drill, the knife cannot be made; if the strikers cease to strike, the same result follows. And thus it comes to pass that the trade of Sheffield is crippled by a trades-union tyranny. The workmen, knowing their strength, have trades-unions for each branch of the trade. If the makers at a particular manufactory feel aggrieved they “strike,” and the works are stopped till the master comes to terms, the men on strike being supported meanwhile by their brother makers at other manufactories. If a few unhappy makers chancing not to belong to the union remain at work, another branch of the trade “strikes,” and it not unfrequently happens that the non-unionists find their houses half blown up at night by some “infernal machine” dropped down their cellars. The punishment devised for dry-grinders being non-unionists or “knobsticks,” as they are called, is gunpowder, which, being placed under their grindstones at night, explodes with the first spark of labour in the morning, and blinds or maims the workman. Such outrages are very dreadful, but they are the price Sheffield pays for her superiority in the manufacture of edge-tools; and until education shall teach her workmen better, there is little hope that her social life will be worthy her commercial greatness.
A BLOOD-STAINED FRUIT.
THE MULBERRY.
When every other tree in garden, wood, or wold, has donned the green vesture of spring, one still remains in “naked majesty,” an Adam of the Eden. The cold night winds, nipping so many tender buds which had been too easily lured forth by transitory noontide sunshine, beat harmlessly upon the mulberry’s sapless bark; and not till the last spring frost is over, and cold has finally yielded to the mild persuasions of approaching summer, does it abandon its bare-branched security, and suffer its young leaves to venture forth, gladdening the watchful gardener with an unerring token that his hitherto sheltered floral nurslings may now be safely trusted in the open parterre. Nor has this tree’s extreme wariness escaped the poet’s observant eye, for Cowley describes at length how
Cautiously the mulberry did move,
And first the temper of the skies would prove
What sign the sun was in, and if she might
Give credit yet to winter’s seeming flight.
She dares not venture on his first retreat,
Nor trust her fruit and leaves to doubtful heat;
Her ready sap within her bark confines
Till she of settled warmth has certain signs;
Then making rich amends for the delay,
With sudden haste she dons her green array.
But though the foliage displays such singular reticence as regards making its first appearance, it might offer the same kind of apology which was tendered by Charles Lamb, when, on being remonstrated with for coming to business so late in the morning, he replied, “But then remember how early I go away in the afternoon;” for though mulberry leaves are the last to put forth in spring, they are the very first to leave in autumn, the least frost bringing them all to the ground.
Its peculiar cautiousness earning for it from the ancients the title of the wisest of trees, the mulberry was dedicated by the Greeks to Minerva; while, to account for the fact of there being both a white and a black-fruited species, they wove the fanciful legend of Pyramus and Thisbe—more familiar, perhaps, to many from the burlesque of Bottom, than from the pathetic original of Ovid, who, in sad seriousness, celebrates how, when the lover deemed his lady slain, he threw himself upon his own sword, when she, returning only to find him dying, slew herself also; and this Romeo and Juliet of the ancient world thus expired together at the foot of the mulberry tree where