glen is the scene of the somnambulist tragedy told by Wordsworth, in which Sir Eglamore returns from afar only in time to find his disconsolate Emma perishing in this torrent. She only lives long enough to discover his previously doubted constancy. From Patterdale, at the foot of the lake, there is a glorious drive-provided tourists are weather-proof like those stalwart Oxonians who had here their favorite haunt, and do not limit their vision, like one party we saw, to the vault of their umbrellas to the summit-house, the highest residence in the district, on the road to Ambleside. A man on our stage-coach manages to draw the attention of half our party from a landscape they had come a hundred miles, perhaps, to see, to an unextracted bullet in his arm, received from the Zulus. This bullet becomes the seed out of which grows an Igdrasil of political discussion. It is possible that Wordsworth had known much of this sort of thing before he wrote those lines, found passim in his poems, which show how petty a creature man commonly is in the presence of nature's grandeurs. But this small bullet and the small-talk over it remind us that we are on our way into the world of affairs again. Hark! is that the nightingale ? No; it is the steam-whistle! Our revels now are ended. The steam-whistle startles the air, and sends the mountain spirits back to their ravines and caves again. The Genii of the Lakes protested against this form in which Triton came to blow his wreathed horn on Windermere. Wordsworth placed across the railway track a sonnet that seemed insurmountable, but it came on nevertheless; and on the whole we find it comfortable that we can take a good look at Windermere and the mountains in the morning, and talk them over at our London dinner-table the same evening. Nevertheless, they who would see the English Lakes as they environed the Lake Poets, who would know something of their sweet solitudes and their simplehearted peasantry, would act wisely in embracing the earliest opportunity to visit them. They will no doubt be able to do it very rapidly and cheaply ere long, but whether it will be so well worth doing may be doubted. Ν POTTERY IN THE UNITED STATES. IN earlier colonial times, when the abun-land; then might be seen tiny tea-cups, dant material resources of this country odd jugs, and majestic tea-pots gay with were neither explored nor as yet imagined, blue shepherdesses, boats, and pagodas our ancestors were content to dine from sailing in the air, still highly prized and pewter plates and porringers, their few kept for show. precious pieces of china being reserved for company use, or display on the shelves of the equally precious nut-wood parlor cupboards. This china, either brought over by the colonists from the mother countries, or smuggled into port by illicit traders with the East, was the quaint blue and white porcelain introduced into Europe by the Portuguese, and the Dutch and English East India Companies, who successively traded with Japan. About the middle of the seventeenth century came the excellent imitations of this ware manufactured at Delft, in Hol Later, after the cession of New Amsterdam to the English, Lambeth and Fulham copies of this delf were followed in time by the Liverpool and Staffordshire printed earthenwares, none of which, however, were yet in general use, pewter being preferred for ordinary occasions until the Revolution. About the year 1659 we begin to hear of potteries for the production of tiles, bricks, and the coarser sorts of stone-ware. In 1740 New York boasts of several establishments for making earthen dishes, and in 1770 so great has been the progress in processes that we find porcelain has been attempted, for the Southwark China Fac- | ority of American wares, confessed they tory at Philadelphia "promises encouragement to skillful painters and enamellers in blue," and offers a premium for the production of zaffre, a compound of cobalt. As early as 1765 the number of potteries springing up in the colonies alarmed the English manufacturers. The wares were rude and devoid of beauty, but they were beginning to supply the home demand, and their increase pointed silently though eloquently to a future of ceramic independence of the mother country. 66 It was during this year that Josiah Wedgwood expressed fears for England's earthenware trade with America, so small | an event as the erection of a new pottworks in South Carolina" causing him to look with prophetic eye to the time when the young country would prove their dangerous rival, for, said he, "they have every material there equal, if not superior, to our own for the manufacture.' And Wedgwood spoke with knowledge, for he had already tested the clays of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, and made arrangements for a regular supply of the "unaker" or Pensacola clays. How well-founded were the fears of the "great potter" may be judged by the present progress of the industry in the United States, and the accounts from the potting districts of England within the past few years. At a meeting of a board of arbitration held at Hanley in the beginning of 1877, in reference to a proposed reduction of labor prices for the avowed purpose of "keeping the growth and increase of make in the States in check," the head of one of the leading manufacturing firms said in effect that he had visited the United States in 1875, gone through their largest potteries, and had seen goods of a reliable character better than could be imported at the same price, and his impression was that unless the tariff was reduced, and English wares made at less cost, England would lose her American trade altogether. A second prominent potter declared that the States not only have all the requisite materials, but they are superior to those used in Staffordshire; that as for the quality of their wares, he wished he could make as good; and that to keep ground with American goods, English labor prices must be reduced. Other speakers, referring to the superi experienced great difficulty in retaining their trade in that quarter, prophesying that "at the present rate of progress in the United States, in ten years English crockery would find no market there at all." The history of this progress is one of perpetual struggle, for extraordinary difficulties met the pioneer at every turn. In a country rich in all the requisite but as yet undeveloped materials, except for the manufacture of the coarsest wares, he was obliged to import every pound of flint, spar, and finer clay he used, in slow sailing vessels taking months for the voyage; he had also to train or import labor, to pay high wages, and learn by costly experiment in a new climate the proper treatment of his clays. The industrial and mechanical difficulties were perhaps the least against which the potter had to contend. Chief of all, and not overcome until within a recent period, was the strong popular preference for the established English wares, necessitating a continual improvement in the quality and selection of domestic goods, and this, too, at a time when the British manufacturers, in their efforts to control the American market, resorted to repeated lowering of their selling prices, compelling corresponding reductions in home wares made at far higher cost. This rivalry with the British producers was not without its good effects, for there is no question but that it stimulated the invention of the potters, and aroused the spirit which has caused the remarkable development of the industry in the short period over which its interests virtually extend, for although coarse wares were manufactured one hundred and forty years ago, the production of white goods can not be said to have commenced until within the last thirty years. It must be conceded, however, that the forty per cent. tariff of 1861 gave the American potters the strongest incentive to compete with foreign manufacture, and the opportunity to resist British efforts to control the trade. There are now eight hundred potteries in the United States, the total products of which supply fifty per cent. of the wares annually consumed, the chief centres of the industry being Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, and East Liverpool, in Ohio. The former city offered peculiar attrac tions to the potter, both from its railways and canals connecting it with the great cities of the Union, and its nearness to mines of the raw material. West and southwest lie the coal, kaolin, spar, and quartz mines of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and eastward the fire and white clays of New Jersey. The clays of Ohio, Missouri, and Indiana, and abundance of fuel, have built up East Liverpool, making it the ceramic centre of the West. For thirty years it has been engaged in the manufacture of the ordinary Rockingham and yellow wares, furnishing the greater portion of the two million dollars' worth annually produced in this country. It was not until 1873 that white ware of any description engaged the attention of the Liverpool potters: to-day white granites, semi-chinas, and "cream-color" are manufactured in fourteen thriving establishments, and one or two firms are experimenting in china. A two hours' ride from New York by rail takes one to Trenton, in point of production the principal seat of ceramic manufacture in the United States. As the train whirls rapidly along, and enters the suburbs of the town, one catches a glimpse of groups of substantial new buildings, whose ruddy flame-crowned cones proclaim that the great industry is striking its roots outward from the centre with its crowded factories and its network of railways and canals. Reaching the southern or eastern portion of the city, one is surrounded by telling signs of the peculiar activity which has appropriately given this region its title of the "Staffordshire of America." On every side may be seen smoking chimneys and kilns looming above tall modern factories, or long, low, weather-stained buildings, lumbering carts filled with raw material, and drays piled high with casks and crates of finished ware. The freight trains come, with their tonnage of spars, quartz, clays, and coals from north, south, east, and west; and lazily from the southward along the winding waterways float the slow, mule-drawn canal-boats that lend a dreamy old-time aspect to the scene, which is not lessened by the knowledge that rising around us are the symbols of an industry so ancient | crushers, which, as they steadily revolve as to be prehistoric, though so little modi- on their heavy axes, grind the calcined fied by centuries of development that it spar or quartz to a dry powder by contact has not discarded, but merely improved, with French flints or pebbles. You will the block, the mould, the shaper, the oven, not desire to stay long, for the noise is and the potter's wheel of the earliest times. deafening, and then one sees literally We are suddenly brought back to the nothing of the process. This is not the stirring present by the lively sounds of case in another department, where the bells and steam-whistles announcing that grinding is done in water. Here one can the noon hour is ended, and by the appear- trace the progress of the calcined mineral ance of a troop of very modern lads and from the stony lump to the purified white lasses hurrying to the "works." Let us powder. enter with them. Work has already begun, for as the gate swings open to admit us, the soft hum of machinery is heard, and in the yard men are busy loading and wheeling away barrows of heavy stones, which prove to be massive quartz and feldspar. These bluish-white translucent rocks are the quartz, mined on the shores of the Susquehanna, in Maryland; this feldspar, flesh-tinted, and occasionally stained with red, was mined in Maine. Both are important ingredients of our finest wares. Kaolin, if used alone, would produce a body characterized by porosity and want of strength, to remedy which quartz and feldspar are added; these minerals, under certain conditions of combination and heat, fuse, and bind the whole into a dense, sonorous, and partially vitrified body; but both must first be subjected to calcination to render them friable, or easily crushed. Step into the mill-room of the pottery, and take a look at the great iron cylinder First it is thrown into a circular stone trough, and crushed into coarse powder by two millstones that chase each other around and around like massive wheels; then it is shovelled into the tubs of the burr-mills, and mingling with the water to a milky white fluid, is swept with ceaseless whirl till fine enough to flow down into the wooden troughs below. There it lies for a few minutes, depositing its sand and coarser particles; then the finer white fluid flows into wooden receptacles still lower down, where in thirty hours it will become so hard that it must be dug out in blocks for drying in the kilns. Up to certain stages in these and other operations everything seems to depend on continuous motion; so tenacious are the materials in course of preparation that a few minutes' stoppage would entail great loss of time and labor. Kaolin undergoes its first preparation at the mines. Unfortunately much of the American clay is obtained in so prim |