London to John O 1 Groat's. 303 



Swing their heavy sledge, 



With measured beats and slow ; 

 Like the sexton ringing the village bell, 



When the evening sun is low. 



Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised 

 to human industries. Here the great hammer of the 

 Scandinavian Thunderer descended, took nest, and 

 hatched a brood of ten thousand little iron beetles 

 for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that 

 Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear 

 their clatter night and day upon a thousand anvils. 

 0, Yale of Vulcan ! 0, Valley of Knives ! Was ever 

 a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere, that 

 did not carry in the first pocket made for him one 

 of thy cheap blades ? Did ever a reaper in the Old 

 World or New cut and bind a sheaf of grain, who 

 did not wield one of thy famous sickles ? All 

 Americans who were boys forty years ago, will re- 

 member three English centres of peculiar interest to 

 them. These were Sheffield, Colebrook Dale, and 

 Paternoster Row. There was hardly a house or log 

 cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi 

 which could not show the imprint of these three 

 places, on the iron tea-kettle, the youngest boy's 

 Barlow knife, and his younger sister's picture-book. 

 To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield 

 was a huge jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge- 



