It is true that the professionals in machine-making have done much to smooth the path of the amateur. Some of the semi-automatic and automatic machines are so wonderful that one might imagine them endowed with life and professional skill themselves. I have watched, fascinated, the work of a screw-making machine which, after turning the tiny thread, reached over a steel finger and thumb, picked up the screw, lifted it back to a new position and jammed it there for another tool to slide forward at the precisely right second and cut out the cross-nick on the screw-head. There are automatic lathes which seize a steel or brass rod pushed within their clutch and chop it up and make shoulders and grooves and screw-threads on its outside, and drill out the centre and put another and different sized and shaped set of carvings on the inside, throw out the finished part, pull in the metal rod, and commence work afresh on it. Some of these lathes have five or six tools running and each performing its part in turn on the fuse or shell part. In one small-arm factory there is a huge room full of these automatic lathes all whirring and grinding away at their hardest. And the men in that room are so few that one hardly notices them and has an impression that the shop is cheerfully running itself. Actually there is one man to each ten machines, to keep the long brass or steel rods passing into their busy wheels and tools, to maintain and regulate the flow of lubricant which runs constantly on each cutting tool. In this factory there are automatics drilling out the rifle-barrels, the drill pressing in so far at a time, when the machine carefully withdraws it for a busy little steel hand to poke forward and fussily brush off the grit and chips and clear the drill, which then slides smoothly back and goes on with its job. A stream of oil runs on each drill, and something like 1,000 horse-power is required for nothing but the pumping of this oil to the rifle-drilling machines. The factory is turning out 8,000 completed rifles and over 300 machine-guns a week now. And, after the usual fashion, it is busily preparing to add heavily to its output. About twelve acres of new floor space have already been added to the works, and new floor is still being piled on floor, filled with another tossing and churning sea of machinery as fast as it is made ready, and driven up into its top working speed at once. On top of the one room packed with workers and machines the builders are at work on another room, laying the concrete floor, riveting the steel girders of new walls, putting on another new roof. And the moment the floor is down and the roof on and the steel skeleton complete, in come the men who erect the overhead shafting and fill the windows with glass--I might say fill the walls with glass, for each shop is nothing but a glass-sided box--and start to erect the machines. Each of the new glass boxes is about 600 feet long by 40 feet wide, and