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. O, Vale of Vulcan! O, 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 remember 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-pot, and Paternoster Row a psalm-book, each in the generative case. How we young reapers used to discuss the comparative merits and meanings of those mysterious letters on our sickles, B.Y and I.R! What were they? Were they beginnings of words, or whole words themselves? Did they stand for things, qualities, or persons? "Mine is a _By_ sickle; mine is an _Ir_ one. Mine is the best," says the last, "for it has the finest teeth and the best curve." That was our boys' talk in walking through the rye, with bent backs and red faces, a little behind our fathers; who cut a wider work to enable us to keep near them.