The area over which the trade extends is not large. A line drawn east and west through Yeovil and continued for ten miles in each direction would intersect the whole district, which lies on the borderland of Somerset and Dorset, and includes some half-dozen small towns and fair-sized villages, of which Milborne Port, Sherborne, Stoke-sub-Hamdon, and Martock are the principal. Nor can the trade itself be compared for magnitude with many other industries; it is a mere pigmy beside the cotton, the iron, or the woollen trade. Let us have the pleasure of conducting the reader over one of the glove factories, fourteen or fifteen of which may be found in Yeovil alone, that he may see the present state of one of the most ancient industries in the country, and have an idea of the number and variety of the processes and hands through which his gloves have passed. Beginning at the beginning, we enter a room in which the raw material lies before us in the shape of hundreds of bundles of sheep-skins tanned and bleached as white as the driven snow. Handling them, we find them soft and elastic to the touch. These are not the skins of our high-bred English sheep, which are wholly unfit for the purpose, but the skins of half-wild mountain-sheep, which are collected by Jews over the east of Europe and the western part of Asia. The glover does not care for the skins of your wool-producing sheep; his dictum is, ‘the rougher the hair, the better the pelt’ (skin). These skins were formerly imported untanned; but the German tanners have now beaten the English tanners out of the market, and they are bought in the condition in which we now see them here, in Berlin or Vienna. As the skins are required, they are taken out of the store and soaked in a vat containing the yolks of eggs, in the proportion of ten dozen skins to one gallon of yolks. In order to secure that every part of the skins shall be thoroughly soaked, they are trodden by men’s feet. This is done, it is said, ‘to feed or nourish them;’ or, in other words, to make them still softer and more elastic. The soaking over, the skins are next taken to the dyehouse, and laid face uppermost on a slightly convex, lead-covered board. Here they are rapidly and frequently brushed over with dyestuff until they have absorbed a sufficient quantity to give them the desired colour, when they are again brushed with what is called ‘a striker’—that is, a liquid preparation that will fix and render permanent the dye already put on them.