and gifts imparted, there are about two millions and a half of
children under daily instruction? In remote rural districts probably; in
the towns certainly not. The steam-engine is now the pen-maker. Hecatombs
of geese are consumed at Michaelmas and Christmas; but not all the geese
in the world would meet the demand of England for pens. The supply of
_pates de foie gras_ will be kept up--that of quills, whether known as
_primes_, _seconds_, or _pinions,_ must be wholly inadequate to the wants
of a _writing_ people. Wherever geese are bred in these islands, so
assuredly, in each succeeding March, will every full-fledged victim be
robbed of his quills; and then turned forth on the common, a very waddling
and impotent goose, quite unworthy of the name of bird. The country
schoolmaster, at the same spring-time, will continue to buy the smallest
quills, at a low price, clarify them after his own rude fashion, make them
into pens, and sorely spite the boy who splits them up too rapidly. The
better quills will still be collected, and find their way to the quill
dealer, who will exercise his empirical arts before they pass to the
stationer. He will plunge them into heated sand, to make the external skin
peel off, and the external membrane shrivel up; or he will saturate them
with water, and alternately contract and swell them before a charcoal
fire; or he will dip them in nitric acid, and make them of a gaudy
brilliancy but a treacherous endurance. They will be sorted according to
the quality of the barrels, with the utmost nicety. The experienced buyer
will know their value by looking at their feathery ends, tapering to a
point; the uninitiated will regard only the quill portion. There is no
article of commerce in which the market value is so difficult to be
determined with exactness. For the finest and largest quills no price
seems unreasonable; for those of the second quality too exorbitant a
charge is often made. The foreign supply is large, and probably exceeds
the home supply of the superior article. What the exact amount is we know
not. There is no duty now on quills. The tariff of 1845--one of the most
lasting monuments of the wisdom of our great commercial minister--abolished
the duty of half-a-crown a thousand. In 1832 the duty amounted to four
thousand two hundred pounds, which would show an annual importation of
thirty-three millions one hundred thousand quills; enough, perhaps, for
the commercial clerks of England, to