man, when off they were hurried, sixteen and twenty at a time, by girls to magazines, where they peacefully remained ready for exportation.

Although this series of opera tions, when related one after another, may sound simple enough, yet it must be kept in mind that all were performed at once; and when it is considered that a threearmed crane is drawing up bottles, seventy at a time, from three o'clock in the morning till seven o'clock at night (meal hours excepted), it is evident that, without very excellent arrangement, some of the squads either would be glutted with more work than they could perform, or would stand idle with nothing to do:-no one, therefore, dares to hurry or stop; the machinery, in full motion, has the singular appearance which I have endeavoured to describe; and, certainly, the motto of the place might be that of old Goethe's ring"Ohne hast, ohne rast."

Having followed a set of bottles from the brunnen to the store, where I left them resting from their labours, I strolled to another part of the establishment, where were empty bottles calmly waiting for their turn to be filled. I here counted twenty-five bins of bottles, each four yards broad, six yards deep, and eight feet high. A num ber of young girls were carrying thirty-four of them at a time on their heads to an immense trough, which was kept constantly full by a large fountain pipe of beautiful clear fresh water. The bottles, on arriving here, were filled brim-full (as I conceived for the purpose of being washed), and were then ranged in ranks, or rather solid columns, of seven hundred each, there being ten rows of seventy bottles.

It being now seven o'clock, a bell rung as a signal for giving over work, and the whole process came suddenly to an end; for a few seconds, the busy labourers (as in a disturbed ant-heap) were seen irregularly hurrying in all directious; but, in a very short time, all had vanished. For a few minutes I ruminated in solitude about the premises, and then set out to take up my abode for the night at the village, or rather town, of Nieder-Selters: however, I had no sooner, as I vainly thought, bidden adieu to bottles, than I saw, like "Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane," bottles approaching me in every possible variety of attitude. It appears, that all the inhabitants of Nieder-Selters are in the habit of drinking in their houses this refreshing water; but, as the brunnen is in requisition by the Duke all day long, it is only before or after work that a private supply can be obtained: no sooner, therefore, does the evening bell ring, than every child in the village is driven out of its house to take empty bottles to the brunnen; and it was this singular-looking legion which was now approaching me. The children really looked as if they were made of bottles; some wore a pyramid of them in baskets on their heads some were laden with them hanging over their shoulders before and behind-some carried them strapped round their middle--all had their hands full; and little urchins that could scarcely walk were advancing, each hugging in its arms oue single bottle. In fact, at Nieder-Selters, " fant" means a being totally unable to carry a bottle; puberty and manhood are proved by bottles; a strong man brags of the number he can carry; and superannuation means

an in

being no longer able in this world to bear....bottles.

The road to the brunnen is actually strewed with fragments, and so are the ditches; and when the reader is informed that, besides all he has so patiently heard, bottles are not only expended and exported, but actually are made at Nieder-Selters, he must admit that no writer can possibly do justice to that place unless every line of his description contains, at least once, the word ....bottle. The moralists of Nieder-Selters preach on bottles. Life, they say, is a sound bottle, and death a cracked one-thoughtless men are empty bottles-drunken men are leaky ones; and a man highly educated, fit to appear in any country and in any society, is, of course, a bottle corked, rosined, and stamped with the seal of the Duke of Nassau.

As soon as I reached the village inn, I found there all the slight accommodation I required: a tolerable dinner soon smoked on the table before me; and, feeling that I had seen quite enough for one day of brown stone-bottles, I ventured to order (merely for a change) a long-necked glass, one of a vegetable fluid superior to all the mineral water in the world..

The following morning, previous to returning to the brunnen, I strolled for some time about the village; and the best analysis I can offer of the Selters' water is the plain fact, that the inhabitants of the village, who have drunk it all their lives, are certainly, by many degrees, the healthiest and ruddiest looking peasants I have anywhere met with in the dominions of the Duke of Nassau.

This day being a festival, on reaching the brunnen at eleven o'clock, I found it entirely deserted

-no human being was to be seen: all had been working from three o'clock in the morning till nine, but they were now in church, and were not to return to their labour till twelve. I had, therefore, the whole establishment to myself; and going to the famous brunnen, my first object was to taste its water. On drinking it fresh from the source, I observed that it possessed a strong chalybeate taste, which I had never perceived in receiving it from the bottle. The three iron crates suspended to the arms of the crane were empty, and there was nothing at all upon the wooden dressers which, the evening before, I had seen so busily crowded and surrounded: in the middle of the great square were the stools on which the cork-covering women had sat; while, at some distance to the left, were the solid columns, or regiments, of uncorked bottles, which I had seen filled brimfull with pure crystal water the evening before. On approaching this brown-looking army, I was exceedingly surprised at observing from a distance, that several of the bottles were noseless, and I was wondering why such should ever have been filled, when, on getting close to these troops, I perceived, to my utter astonishment, that not only about one-third of them were in the same mutilated state, but that their noses were calmly lying by their sides supported by the adjoining bottles! What could possibly have been the cause of the fatal disaster which, in one single night, had so dreadfully disfigured them, I was totally at a loss to imagine: the devastation which had taken place resembled the riddling of an infantry regiment under a heavy fire; yet few of our troops, even at Waterloo,

lost so great a proportion of their men as had fallen in twelve hours among these immovable phalanxes of bottles. Had they been corked, one might have supposed that they had exploded, but why nothing but their noses had suffered I really felt quite incompetent to explain.

As it is always better honestly to confess one's ignorance, rather than exist under its torture, with a firm step I walked to the door of the governor of the brunnen; and sending up to him a card, bearing the name under which I travelled, he instantly appeared, politely assuring me, that he should have much pleasure in affording any information I desired.

Instantly pointing to the noseless bottles, my instructor was good enough to inform me, that bottles in vast numbers being supplied to the Duke from various manufactories, in order to prove them, they are filled brimfull (as I had seen them) with water, and being left in that state for the night, they are the next morning visited by an officer of the Duke, whose wand of office is a thin, long-handled, little hammer, which at the moment happened to be lying before us on the ground.

It appears that the two prevailing sins to which stone bottles are prone, are having cracks, and being porous, in either of which case they, of course, in twelve hours, leak a little.

The Duke's officer, who is judge and jury in his own court-yard, carries his own sentences into execution with a rapidity which even our Lord Chancellor himself can only hope eventually to imitate. Glancing his hawk-like eye along each line, the instant he sees a bottle not brimfull, without listening to long-winded arguments, he

at once decides "that there can be no mistake-that there shall be no mistake;" and thus at one blow or tap of the hammer, off goes the culprit's nose. "So much for Buckingham!"

Feeling quite relieved by this solution of the mystery, I troubled the governor with a few questions, to reply to which he very kindly conducted me to his countinghouse, where, in the most liberal and gentlemanlike manner, he gave me all the data I required.

The following, which I extracted from the day-book, is a statement showing the number of bottles which were filled for exportation during the year 1882, with the proportionate number filled during each month.

Besides the above, there is a private consumption, amounting on an average, to very nearly half a million of bottles per annum.

It will, I hope, be recollected, that by the time a bottle is sealed, it has undergone fifteen operations, all performed by different people. The Duke, in his payments, does not enter into these details, but, delivering his own bottles, he gives 17 kreuzers (nearly sixpence) for every hundred, large or small, which are placed, filled, in his magazines. The peasants, therefore, either share their labour and pro

fits among themselves, or the whole of the operations are occasionally performed by the different members of one family; but so much activity is required in constantly stooping and carrying off the bottles, that this work is principally performed by young women of eighteen or nineteen, assembled from all the neighbouring villages; and who, by working from three in the morning till seven at night, can gain a florin a day, or 30 florins a month, Sunday (excepting during prayers) not being, I am sorry to say, at Nieder-Selters, a day of

rest.

For the bottles themselves, the Duke pays 4 florins per cent for the large ones, and 3 florins per cent for the small ones. The large bottles, when full, he sells at the brunnen for 13 florins a hundred.

His profit, last year, deducting all expenses, appeared to be, as nearly as possible, 50,000 florins; and yet, this brunnen was originally sold to the Duke's ancestor for a single butt of wine!

On coming out of the office, the establishment was all alive again, and the peasants being in their Sunday clothes, the picture was highly coloured. Young women, in groups of four and five, with little white or red caps perched on the tops of their heads, from which streamed three or four broad ribands, of different colours, denoting the villages they proceeded from, in various directions, singing

as they went, were walking together, heavily laden with bottles. They were dressed in blue petticoats, clean white shifts tucked up above the elbows, with coloured stays laced, or rather half unlaced, in front. Old women, covering the corks with leather, in similar costume, but in colours less gaudy, were displaying an activity much more vigorous than their period of life. Across this party-coloured, well-arranged system, which was as regular in its movements as the planets in their orbits, an officer of the Duke, like a comet, occasionally darted from the office to the brunnen, or from the tiers of empty bottles which had not yet been proved, to the magazine of full ones ready to embark on their travels.

In quitting the premises, as I passed the regiments of bottles, an operation was proceeding which I had not before witnessed. Women in wooden shoes were reversing the full bottles; in fact, without driving these brown soldiers from their position, they were making them stand upon their heads instead of upon their heels-the object of this military somerset being to empty them; however, every noseless bottle, water and all, was hurled over a wall, into a bin prepared on purpose to receive them: and the smashing sound of devastation which proceeded from this odd-looking operation, it would be very difficult to describe.

The Alexander Column, Saint Petersburg. Although its height falls considerably short of that of many other monumental columns, this is by far the most stupendous monolithic pillar ever erected, it being a single piece of granite measuring eighty-four feet by fourteen in diameter-one foot less than the diameter of the monument at London. This prodigious mass was brought from the quarry of Pytterlax in Finland, where it had excited the attention of the architect Montferrand. In order to transport it from its bed to the water's edge, masses of rock were levelled by blasting, and an inclined plane formed, continued, by a solid construction of timber work, to the vessel-the same in which the huge blocks of granite for the pedestal of the column had been conveyed to St. Petersburg. Along this path it was rolled by means of eight windlasses, after incessant exertions during fourteen days. Almost every difficulty however appeared to have been surmounted, when just as it was about to be deposited in the vessel, the whole mass was precipitated into the water. Luckily no lives were lost, but the shock was tremendous the consternation indescribable; yet such was the promptitude of the engineers present and the energy of the workmen, that they succeeded in raising it into the vessel in about forty-eight hours afterwards. On arriving at St. Petersburg, the column was landed

in the same manner in which it had been shipped, and was drawn up an inclined plane, to a platform of timber and masonry level with the top of the pedestal. This being accomplished, on the 30th August, 1832, (St. Alexander's Day) it was raised upright on its base by means of sixty cables and capstans, the whole operation occupying no more than the incredibly short space of twenty minutes! The emperor and the whole of the imperial court were present at this unique spectacle, besides countless thousands of spectators. The weight of the solid shaft of granite composing the column has been computed to be very nearly 900 tons.

Architectural Improvements, 1833.-Both in the provinces and the metropolis the architectural opportunities afforded by the demand for new public structures and other improvements have not been few in number, while many of them have been important in point of character. A full report of the various buildings of this class, either commenced or completed within the present year, would be an undertaking of some labour and extent. All that we can here do is, to give a recapitulatory glance at a few of the more prominent ones. The new Custom-House at Liverpool promises to become a very conspicuous architectural feature in that town, and to be not unworthy the commercial importance of the place. Birmingham will be hence