it in time.” Perhaps, but I don’t envy them the time till they do. Everywhere I saw the women, fresh young girls and elderly toil-worn women alike, closely intent on their work, wasting no fraction of a second between the completion of one tool’s cutting and its withdrawal and the substitution of the next tool--and such fractions are the more precious when their loss means waste of a valuable lathe’s time as well as the operator’s--obviously driving the work, giving hand and mind and eye to getting through it quickly and getting on to the next. Among many impressions I retain very clearly of the women’s deftness and hustling intentness there is one I remember especially. A young and pretty girl was testing shell-fuses, and as I stopped with the manager beside her she flicked one quick upward glance from her work to us and went on swiftly and steadily with her job. The manager explained to me what she was doing. A box of fuses stood at her left hand; fixed to the bench before her was an instrument which the touch on a lever set revolving rapidly, and a little to the right and beyond this stood a sort of clock-face with a pointer moving round and indicating the speed of the machine’s revolutions. The operator picked up a fuse, slipped it in the revolving-wheel centre, and started the machine. “Watch the centre of the fuse,” said the manager. I watched it spinning until it lost all shape or outline and became a mere blur. Then--_click_, a tiny black hole appeared in the centre, the operator switched off the current, slipped out the fuse, and put it aside as “passed correct”! “This time,” said the manager, “try to see what figure the clock-finger indicates at the instant the black hole appears.” It was harder to do than it sounds, simply because that girl was so impishly quick at seeing the two things in the same instant that the machine was slowing and the clock-finger sliding backward and slowing before I could get my eye on to it. But by watching the clock and ignoring the fuse I found the needle always went to within a shade of the same point before it checked and slowed. “The whole thing,” said the manager, “is simply a speed test of a shutter which must open only after the speed of revolutions reaches a certain number, and always before it rises to another certain number. With the shutter working correctly, the shell must be moving at a certain speed and spin before that opening comes to allow the flash to pass and burst the shell. It is a check against premature bursts, I believe.”