ultimate uses. The chiselled, sawn, and drilled planks seen in
the first department, were here being fitted and bolted together in the
form of trucks, while the uses of many strange pieces of iron, which had
puzzled him in the blacksmiths' department, became obvious when fitted
to their appropriate woodwork. Here, also, he saw the internal
machinery of railway carriages laid bare, especially the position and
shape of the springs that give elasticity to the buffers, which, he
observed, were just the same in shape as ordinary carriage springs,
placed so that the ends of the buffer-rods pressed against them.

But all this afforded no gratification to Mrs Marrot, whose sensitive
mind dwelt uneasily on the humiliated locomotive, until she suddenly
came on a row of new first-class carriages, where a number of people
were employed stuffing cushions.

"Well, I declare," she exclaimed, "if here ain't cushion-stuffing going
on! I expect we shall come to coat-and-shift-making for porters and
guards, next!"

"No, we haven't got quite that length yet," laughed Will Garvie; "but if
you look along you'll see gilding, and glazing, and painting going on,
at that first-class carriage. Still farther along, in the direction
we're going, is the infirmary."

"The infirmary, Willum!"

"Ay, the place where old and damaged trucks and carriages are sent for
repair. They're all in a bad way, you see,--much in need o' the
doctor's sar'vices."

This was true. Looking at some of these unfortunates, with crushed-in
planks, twisted buffers and general dismemberment, it seemed a wonder
that they had been able to perform their last journey, or crawl to the
hospital. Some of the trucks especially might have been almost said to
look diseased, they were so dirty, while at the corners, where address
cards were wont to be affixed, they appeared to have broken out in a
sort of small-pox irruption of iron tackets.

At last Mrs Marrot left the "works," declaring that her brain was
"whirling worser than was the wheels and machinery they had just left,"
while Bob asseverated stoutly that his appetite for the stupendous had
only been whetted. In this frame of mind the former went home to nurse
her husband, and the latter was handed over to his future master, the
locomotive superintendent of the line.

Reader, it is worth your while to visit such works, to learn what can be
done by the men whom you are accustomed to see, only while trooping home
a