395 
Brick-Making. 
of water, strikes off the surplus soil ; he then immediate- 
ly turns out the contents of the mould upon a stand or 
board of the same size with the brick. A boy takes it 
from thence, and places it on a light barrow, with a lattice- 
work frame fixed over the frame of a long barrow, at 
about three feet high above the wheel, and reduced to 
about eighteen inches in height towards the handles, 
forming an inclined plane. The new made bricks are 
j^laced on this latticed frame, and over them sand is 
thrown in sufficient quantities to prevent their adhering to 
each other, as well as to prevent, in a certain degree, their 
xracking in drying while on the hacks. A girl wheels the 
barrow to the hacks, and places them with great regu- 
larity and dispatch one above the other, a little diago- 
nally, in order to give a free passage to the air. Each 
hack is made wide enough for two bricks, to be placed 
edgeways across, with a passage between the heads of 
each brick ; they are usually made eight bricks high, the 
bottom bricks at the end of each hack are usually old 
ones. 
In showery weather, wheat or rye straw is carefully 
laid over the bricks that are drying on these hacks, to 
keep them as free from wet as possible : for the brick- 
makers do not here, as in places more distant from the 
metropolis, go to the expense of roofed coverings, or long 
sheds, which from the extent of one of these fields would 
be impossible. 
If the weather is tolerably fine, a few days is sufficient 
to make them dry enough to be turned, which is done 
by resetting them more open, and turning them ; and 
six or eight days more are required before they are fit to 
be put into the clamp, for kilns are not in use in this part 
of the county. When sufficiently dry, the clamp-maker 
levels the ground, generally at one end of the range of 
hacks nearly centrical, making the foundation of the in 
