They have still a rough, tumbled, unfinished look, which would prove anything but tempting to a purchaser. They are now forwarded to the laying-out room, where they are stretched with ordinary glove-stretchers, and then put on heated steel hands, which take out all the creases and improve their appearance. Nothing now remains but to assort them, to put them up in neat bundles according to size, to pack them in boxes, and to send them to market. The special gloves that we have been following through all their stages are those which are known in the trade as ‘grain’ goods, and are sold to the public under the name of dogskin, Cape, and other names, each name indicating some peculiarity in the quality and finish of the leather. Many other kinds of gloves are made in the district, such as calf and buck and doe skin; the calf gloves are made from English calf-skins, and the buck and doe from English lambskins. There is also a large manufacture of fabric gloves—in other words, of gloves made of cotton, woollen, silk, or merino material. Real kid, however, is nowhere made in this district. The processes through which leather gloves of every kind pass are very much the same as those described above, and the manufacture of fabric gloves differs only in the comparative fewness of its stages, beginning with the process of punching the material into the required shape. After that, its course is undistinguishable from that of the manufacture of leather gloves. There are altogether about five-and-twenty factories in the district, ranging from one which claims to be the largest glove factory in the world, and is capable of turning out forty thousand pairs per week, to some which produce only from five hundred to a thousand pairs in the same time. These factories give employment to nearly ten thousand persons, five-sixths of whom are women. Only about a quarter of the employees work in the factories; the rest take the work home, and in many cases do it in time which would otherwise be wasted. By thus finding employment for the wives and daughters of an immense number of agricultural labourers—an employment which in no way interferes with their domestic duties—the gloving brings a large amount of comfort into the homes of the peasantry of the west, and alleviates a lot which would under other circumstances be hard and hopeless in the extreme. IN ALL SHADES. CHAPTER XIX.