Passing through the light and handsome offices, we find ourselves in what at first sight appears to be another park, shut in on three sides by long lines of high buildings. This is, however, not designed for a park, but is nothing more than the superbly-kept Factory Yard, embracing ten or twelve acres. Asphalt walks run down and across, connecting the various buildings that skirt the yard with each other, and with the dock at its foot. Beside and between the walks, every square foot of ground in this immense yard has been seeded with grass, whose green and well-kept borders are here and there fringed with shrubs and flowers. The walks are neatly kept, and though over two thousand workmen tramp daily through the yard, we will not see a bit of dirt as big as a filbert anywhere.[1] Up and down run railroad tracks from the main gate to the dock, with branch tracks to each shop door. These tracks aggregate over five miles in length, and are in constant use in bringing coal, iron, and lumber from the Central Railroad track outside, or the dock at the foot of the yard, or carrying car loads of machines to one or the other outlet. For this purpose the Company owns a locomotive, the “I. M. Singer,” which puffs away busily at its work from morning till night. Here are long sheds, beneath which cars are being loaded with Singer machines for Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco. There are long trestles opposite the foundry doors, upon which coal cars, direct from Pennsylvania mines, are pushed by the “I. M. Singer,” and their contents deposited “where they will do the most good.” Iron, sand, and lumber cars are sent similarly to the exact spot where they are to be worked up, and so an immense cost of handling is saved. At the dock, which lies along Staten Island Sound nearly a thousand feet, the Company’s steamer “Edward Clark,” is taking on board a cargo of machines for New York City, or perhaps for some European steamship lying in New York Bay. Footnote 1: An amusing instance recently occurred in a Southern State of the use to which these grass plats could be put by persons whose tender consciences would not permit outright lying. A man interested in selling a cheap imitation “Singer,” sent a letter to a Southern paper, enclosing a spear of grass which, he said, he “had plucked in the yard of the Singer Factory,” as evidence that the Singer Company was falling into decay, and its great factory being overgrown with grass and weeds. Taking it for granted that all women are methodical, we must ask our fair visitors to go with us to the foot of the yard, and begin studying the manufacture of sewing machines just where the manufacturer is obliged to begin making them—at the foundry. [Illustration: [Furnace]] [Illustration: BRASS FURNACE. ]