heir beautiful
products. On Christmas morning, 1864, there was left in the store in
Maiden Lane, New York, but seven dollars' worth of ware, out of an
average stock of one hundred thousand dollars' worth. Perhaps we ought
not to be surprised at this. Consider our silver weddings. It is not
unusual for several thousands of dollars' worth of silver to be
presented on these occasions,--in one recent instance, sixteen thousand
dollars' worth was given. And what lady can be married, now-a-days,
without having a few pounds of silver given to her? For Christmas
presents, of course, silver-ware is always among the objects dangerous
to the sanity of those who go forth, just before the holidays, with a
limited purse and unlimited desires.

What particularly surprises the visitor to the Gorham works at
Providence is to see labor-saving machinery--the ponderous steam-hammer,
the stamping and rolling apparatus--employed in silver work, instead of
the baser metals to which they are usually applied. Nothing is done by
hand which can be done by machinery; so that the three hundred men
usually employed in solid ware are in reality doing the work of a
thousand. The first operation is to buy silver coin in Wall Street. In a
bag of dollars there are always some bad pieces; and as the company
embark their reputation in every silver vessel that leaves the factory,
and are always responsible for its purity, each dollar is wrenched
asunder and its goodness positively ascertained before it is thrown into
the crucible. The subsequent operations, by which these spoiled dollars
are converted into objects of brilliant and enduring beauty, can better
be imagined than described.

New forms of beauty are the constant study of the artist in silver. One
large apartment in the Gorham establishment--the artists' room--is a
kind of magazine or storehouse of beautiful forms, which have been
gathered in the course of years by Mr. George Wilkinson, the member of
the company who has charge of the designing, and who is himself a
designer of singular taste, fertility, and judgment. Here are deposited
copies or drawings of all the former products of the establishment. Here
is a large and most costly library of illustrated works in every
department of art and science. Mr. Wilkinson gets ideas from works upon
botany, sculpture, landscape,--from ancient bas-reliefs and modern
porcelain; but, more frequently, from those large volumes which exhibit
the glories of ar