And that is the sort of thing I have been meeting throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain. It isn’t only the big firms and factories that are on War work. The little fellows are doing their bit just as energetically, and if each of their shares is small it must bulk considerably in the total; and many of them, by devoting all their energy to certain screws or cups or cones, are able to free the large makers of this small work, and leave them to handle other parts and use up the fitments turned in to them. Every scrap of work turned out by every firm or factory is done to gauge, and a screw made in a back room in Bermondsey and another turned at Clydebank will fill and fit a screw-hole bored in a Birmingham shop just as exactly as if the one man or machine had made the lot. But the gauging work is quite a pretty story in itself, though I must leave out its telling in the meantime. III SUBLIME TO THE--SUBLIME! The car had run into the closer traffic of the town, and the engineer was still pointing out various works that had been converted from all trades under the sun to the one and only that counts to-day, when he dropped a remark that roused a fresh current of curiosity. “It isn’t only regular business firms that are in on this game, you know,” he said. “There’s a good story I must get the Eastern district man to tell you, about an old-clo’ Jew that wanted to switch his jet-bead machines or something and his horribly sweated bonnet-makers on to war work. He’d have taken on any contract he could grab too, from 15-inch shells downwards. But the day’s long past when a man can hook a contract on the gamble of sub-contracting it out, so our Jew misfired that lot. I rather fancy his bonnet hands are button-holing cartridge-belts or something now, though. But clothing and kit isn’t my line, and I don’t know the details, and I’ve plenty of queer conversion cases inside my own job. There’s one little place I have now would tickle you. The factory is a top back bedroom in a little side street, the machinery is one knock-kneed, rheumaticky lathe, and the factory staff is one old man, although, between ourselves, I believe his old missus takes a turn and keeps the lathe running while he’s asleep. The room isn’t big enough to hold the lathe and the length of brass rod that feeds into it and turns into a fuse-part, so they’ve knocked a hole in the wall and the brass rod sticks out through it and works in again through the lathe an inch at a time. Then there’s another little place something after the same style to begin with, but growing a lathe at a time. It’s just down the street here, and we pass it presently.”