, and forgot
to give me another lecture. My next four years were spent to more
purpose than the last. Being less in a hurry, I took time to build up
a flourishing business in partnership with Laura's husband. As for the
baronet's daughter--for we must get everybody into the concluding
tableau--why there she is--that lady cutting bread and butter for the
children, with as matronly an air as Werter's Charlotte: she is my
wife; and we laugh to this day at the oddity of that First Interview
which led to so happy a _denouement_.

VISIT TO A CHOCOLATE MANUFACTORY.

Birmingham, so says the _Times_, is famous for 'lacquered shams;' and
any one who has sojourned for a while in the huge, smoky toy-shop will
add--for not a few genuine realities! To walk from factory to factory,
from workshop to workshop, and view the extraordinary mechanical
contrivances, the ingenious adaptations of means to ends, to say
nothing of the eager spirit of application manifested by the busy
population, produces an impression on the mind of no common character.
Besides which, the town itself, so ill-arranged and ugly, is a
spectacle; and in the people that inhabit the dismal streets, the
visitor may find studies in morality as well as manufactures.

We have something to say about one of the realities alluded to
above--not the making of pens, or tea-pots, or papier-mache; but of
something in which breakfasts are implicated all over the kingdom--the
making of cocoa and chocolate as carried on by Messrs Cadbury,
Brothers. These gentlemen having kindly invited us to a sight of their
establishment, we took the opportunity of witnessing their processes
for converting raw produce into an acceptable article of diet, aided
by the ample explanations of one of the partners. Such a manufacture
seems out of place among bronze and brass and hardware, but the
factory stands away from the fuliginous quarter, on the verge of
Edgbaston--that Belgravia of Birmingham--where sunshine and blue sky
are not perpetually hidden by smoke. What we saw there is worth the
telling, as we hope to shew.

Here, however, we must say a few words concerning the raw material. It
appears that the Spaniards were the first Europeans who tasted
chocolate; it was part of their spoil in the conquest of Mexico.
Bernardo de Castile, who accompanied Cortez, describing one of
Montezuma's banquets, says: 'They brought in among the dishes above
fifty great jars made of _good cacao_, with