the rapidity with which the work is done, and with the skill shown in dealing with flaws in the leather. Here, for example, is a skin with a hole in the best part of it about the size of a shilling; with seeming rashness, the man cuts the leather so that that very hole comes into one of the oblong squares. We call attention to the fact, when, with a smile, he points out that at that precise point a hole will be required for the thumb-piece. The pieces of leather, called in the trade ‘trancs’—for they are no longer skins—are now passed on to another room, where they are cut into their final shape. Hitherto, we have been dealing with the preparation of the material for gloves, and a stranger might have followed all the processes so far without gathering from what he saw any indication of the use to be made of these pieces of leather. But now they begin to assume a shape which cannot be mistaken. The reader, especially the fair reader, has doubtless often seen, if not used, the shapes with which pastry is cut into leaves, circles, squares, and so on. Now, if you will put your two hands together, palms uppermost, and imagine a shape that would cut out the figure made by these two hands, minus the thumbs, and treating the two little fingers as one, you will have a very fair idea of a glover’s punch or ‘web.’ In the room we now enter we find quite a number of these punches, agreeing with the number of sizes manufactured. One of them is laid on a sliding table edge uppermost; then six of these oblong squares of leather—which have been placed face to face in pairs, so that right and left hand gloves may be cut together—are laid upon it, and covered with a thick pad of wood or vulcanite. The table is pushed forward until the punch and its burden rest under an iron press, not unlike a printing-press. One pull at the powerful lever, and the press comes down, and the leather is cut. The thumb-pieces are next treated in the same manner. Up the back of every pair of gloves there are three lines of ornamental work of some kind. If these gloves are to have the heavy silk-work on the back called tambouring, they will now be laid upon a block and punctured with as many holes as there are to be stitches in the tambour-work. Before leaving this room, the size of the gloves is stamped on the inside of one, and a consecutive or matching number is written inside each of the two pieces of leather that are now an embryo pair of gloves, so that if, in any of the subsequent processes, they should be accidentally separated, they may be identified and brought together again. After they have been looked over and carefully perfected with scissors wherever the punch may have left a jagged edge, they are ready to resume their travels.