The usual store in the timber-field amounts to 60,000 loads in various stages of seasoning. The varieties of climate in which the British army has to serve are so many, that foreign woods have been introduced to supply the place of oak, which cannot be found in quantities equal to the demand. Thus we find in the timber-field sabicu, a dense East-Indian wood which is used for the heavy blocks of gun carriages; pedouk, from the same country, which is employed for a similar purpose; and iron bark, an Australian wood. Of English timber, such as ash, elm, and beech, there is a very large store. What is called wheel timber, on the soundness and proper adaptation of which depends the safety of the artillery and transport service, is entirely composed of the most graceful trees of our woodlands; the spokes being made of oak, the naves of elm, the felloes or rims of ash. Beech is also largely used for the fuses of shells and the woodwork of saddles. When any particular logs are required, they are selected by the timber-master, picked up by the travelling crane, hoisted into the railway truck, and conveyed at once to the saw-mills close at hand. On the threshold of the largest mill the logs meet with a grim reception from an immense circular saw 66 inches in diameter, which at once attacks the huge log and separates it as expeditiously as your Eastern soldier divides with his scimitar a floating handkerchief. This formidable instrument traverses a space of 30 feet, and is thus enabled to fix its teeth upon the log at whatever part of the entrance it may chance to lie. This transverse section performed, the divided portions are drawn up by machinery into the saw-frames, the largest of which is capable of receiving a log 4 feet square. Once within the mill's maw, as many saws are put in as are necessary to divide the wood into slabs of the required thickness, and a few minutes suffice to reduce it to planks. From the mills the timber is removed again upon the railroad to the seasoning shed, which covers 4 acres of ground. Here it is allowed to remain for years, so stacked that the air fairly circulates through every portion of the immense mass. The seasoning shed is to the timber master what his wine-cellar is to a _bon vivant_. Here he treasures his bins of nine years old oak as though it were wine of a famous vintage. This he keeps as carefully as a young whist-player keeps his best trumps to the end of the game, but with far more judgment, for old oak is precious beyond price, and cannot be got for love or money at a moment's notice. In the dim shadow of this monster store are also piled the completed articles of land-transport that improve by age. That perpendicular wall of finished woodwork contains the bodies of a thousand carriages which were prepared to remove the British army from the pleateau of Sevastopol in anticipation of an inland campaign; the round towers at the corners are their wheels built up and left to season.