sorts and sizes, ready, when cold enough, to be carried into the “drawing room,” which apartment we will now honour with our presence.
Pray, do not run away with the idea that it is a drawing-room in the ordinary sense of the term. No; it is a great barn of a place, uncarpeted, unpapered—even unfurnished, excepting with immense wooden benches, that run all round it and across it in every direction. At regular intervals upon these benches there stand brazen drums as bright as the helmet of a Life Guardsman; and in front of each drum there stands a workman busily engaged in wire drawing. Let us take our stand by one of them for a few seconds and see what he is doing. Taking one of the square strips of brass we have seen in the cutting-mill, he hammers its end to a point on a small anvil at one side of him, and passes it through the eye of a huge needle fixed in the bench on the other side of him. He then seizes the point of the strip of metal with a great pair of pincers attached by a chain to the drum, puts his foot upon a treadle beneath him, and round goes the drum—the Giant in the rolling-mill turns it—dragging the pincers with it, and drawing the strip of metal slowly but surely through the round eye of the needle. As soon as a foot or two of the strip has passed through the eye, the machinery is stopped; the metal released from the pincers, and fastened to the drum; the machinery set in motion again; and the strip, transformed from square to round in its passage through the needle’s eye, is wound off in goodly wire upon the drum. But the wire is very large—as thick as telegraph-wire—and we are told that the whole of the hands are employed on pin-wire. Well, it is merely passed to the next workman, whose needle’s eye is smaller, and to the next and the next, until it is reduced to the required fineness. You could not pass it through the small eyes first; it would break in the passage. So it is passed through the larger ones to reduce it from square to round, and graduated through the smaller to bring it down to its proper size—scarely a particle of metal being lost on the way, but the wire gaining in length what it loses in thickness. I am the happy possessor of a reel of gold wire, so small and so tenacious that any of my lady-readers might sew very fine work with it; and I am still happier in the knowledge that, so long as I retain possession of that reel of wire, I shall never be without what was once a half-sovereign. I cannot tell you how many needles’ eyes that coin passed through before it came to its present condition, any more than I can tell you how many processes and pockets it must pass through before it could be brought back to the state in which it was when I handed it over to those strange workmen who wield the Giant’s power in that strange drawing-room. But this I do know, that I registered up to twenty-five or thirty, and then lost count by reason of being thrown into a perfect fever of anxiety lest my much-loved coin should be drawn to nothing. Of course ordinary wire, not being so finely drawn, does not pass through so many eyes as this—some half-a-dozen or a dozen at the most perhaps. But I mention this as an illustration of the fact that fine wire cannot be produced at one drawing, but must, so to speak, be coaxed down to the requisite degree of attenuation, even when so valuable a metal as gold is used. As a general rule, it may be taken that iron wire requires more coaxing than brass, brass more than copper, and copper more than the precious metals—their different degrees of malleability rendering them amenable to different degrees of treatment. It may also be taken as a rule that those metals which require least coaxing may be drawn finest.
After drawing there is but one other process necessary to the completion of the manufacture, and that is “pickling.” As soon as the wire we have seen drawn is taken from the last drum, it is carried off to the pickling-shed, and there steeped in a solution which effectually preserves its colour and its brightness. And having visited this shed, where there is nothing to see, excepting large vats of pickling-liquor, and a great many workpeople, who look as if they had pickled themselves instead of the wire, we have passed through the whole of the building where my old friend practises “Drawing by Machinery.”
AN EXCURSION AFTER CHAMOIS.
“What do you say, Paulet, to a day or two among the mountains, chamois shooting?”
“I should like it very much. This is a very pleasant place to visit, and the scenery is very grand, and all that sort of thing, but I am getting dreadfully tired of having nothing to do.”
“So am I. Let us have Karl in, and ask him how we can manage it.”
Without loss of time we sent for Karl. He had been serving us in all sorts of capacities ever since he had relieved us from an unpleasant situation, by procuring a couple of mules from some distant place for our use on an emergency. This was about ten days previously, and though he was of no particular use to us, he was so urgent that we would not send him away while we remained in the country, that we had not the heart to dismiss him. When we asked him if we could not have some chamois shooting, he brightened up in a most singular fashion. Generally he was subdued and rather cringing in his manner, but at our question he drew himself up, looked full in our faces, and seemed altogether another individual. From his answers we found that we might get permission to hunt, but that to do so would occupy more time than we had to spare, and so we gave him to understand; whereupon he timidly suggested that if we did not object to go without permission, he and a friend of his, one Ludwig Bachstein, would willingly accompany us. As what he proposed was nothing less than a poaching expedition, we hesitated whether we ought to accept the offer of their services; but however easy it is to see the enormity of shooting a man’s pheasants without his consent, or at all events of killing them without having first procured the authorisation of the law, the case seemed widely different when it was a question of risking one’s life and limbs in the pursuit of wild goats in Bavaria. After some further discussion, in the course of which Karl assured us that it might be undertaken with