y, London and Liverpool houses in the Brazilian or Cuban trade
have ordered suits of chains, intended for the use of slave-ships. These are
cheap, coarse, painted black, and horrid looking. Among the orders on the
books of a manufacturer, were several dozen pair of hand-cuffs for ladies.

* * * * *

THE EDGE TOOL MANUFACTURE, which is increasing in Birmingham, probably in
consequence of the repeated strikes at Sheffield, added to the superior
position of Birmingham as regards coal, and the markets of London, Liverpool,
and Bristol, is often carried on in conjunction with that of steel toys.
There are forty-five different kinds of axes; fourteen for the American
market, twelve adzes, twenty-six bills and bill-hooks, and upwards of seventy
hoes for different foreign countries--Spain, Portugal, South America, the
United States, and Australia, which will soon consume as much hardware as
America did fifty years ago.

* * * * *

LIGHT STEEL TOYS.--These include chatelains, watch chains, keys, seals,
purses, slides, beads, waist buckles, dress swords, steel buttons for court
dresses, bodkins, spectacle frames, knitting and netting implements, and
steel snuffers. Shoe and knee buckles, which were once universally worn,
alone employed five thousand persons in their manufacture, when it was the
staple trade of the town. The expense and inconvenience of shoe buckles sent
them out of fashion. Dragoons hung in the stirrup, and cricketers tore the
nails of their fingers in picking up cricket balls, from the inconvenient
buckle.

The trade is extremely fluctuating, and depends very much on inventive taste
in which we are manifestly inferior to the French. Some articles we can make
better than they can, but they are always bringing out something new and
pretty. In small beads they undersell us enormously, while in beads of 1/6th
of an inch in diameter, and upwards, we can undersell them.

A visit to a manufactory of light steel toys will afford a great deal of
amusement and instruction.

* * * * *

MEDALLING.--DIE SINKING.--Here again are trades by which Birmingham keeps up
its communication with all the civilised, and part of the uncivilised world.
The first great improvements in coining the current money of the realm
originated at Soho, near Birmingham, at the manufactories of two men whose
memory Englishmen can never hold in sufficient respect--Matthew Boulton and
James Watt. They were the inventors of the machinery