We well remember the impression left on our mind years ago by a visit to some gigantic iron works in Sheffield, an impression which made itself felt for many a month in strange fantastic dreams and painful nightmares—such influence, not on the imagination only but on the nerves, had the dense murky gloom of the dim vaults, suddenly kindled, as by magic, into a fierce incandescent glare by the lava-like torrents of molten iron, the volumes of black smoke, the stifling heat of the oppressed and exhausted atmosphere, and then the roar of unseen waters, suggestive of those subterranean streams of Hades, Acheron and Cocytus, the whirr and hurtling of unnumbered wheels, the terrible and deafening clang of the huge trip-hammers, literally making the solid earth jar and tremble; and last and most appropriate to the scene, the swarthy, grim-visaged workmen, fit representatives of Vulcan and his Cyclops, now glancing into lurid light, now vanishing into darkness, as the fitful flashes rose and fell. Of a verity there can be no much more appropriate representation of Pandemonium than an old-fashioned English iron works on a large scale. But there is no room for marveling or romancing after this fashion in the machine works of Messrs. Hoe & Co., for all the rooms are well aired, well lighted, and none the less adapted to their purpose for being suitable to the accommodation of men who neither are slaves, nor in anywise resemble devils. [Illustration: GREAT FOUNDERY.] From the foundery we proceed, across the open yard, to the smithy, a large, lofty, well proportioned apartment, containing two enormous steam-hammers, the speed and consequent impetus of which can be modulated by a very easy application of manual force, at the pleasure of the operator, so that they can be made either to rise and fall as slowly as the maces of Gog and Magog on the great bell of Saint Dunstan’s, or to impinge upon whatever is objected to their descent with a velocity which almost mocks the eye. In this apartment and its adjunct forge there are no less than eighteen stithies, the bellows of all which are worked by the ubiquitous power of the engine, with anvils of all manners and sizes in due proportion, and sturdy operatives plying them with tranquil and regulated industry, worth five times the amount of human force exerted unequally and impulsively, by fits and starts. These men, for the most part, and, in fact, always when not called off by some casual and unexpected pressure of business in some one department, are kept constantly employed at that peculiar species of work with which each is the most familiar, such method and system in the subdivision of labor being found to insure not only the greatest excellence, but the greatest celerity of workmanship. [Illustration: SMITHY.]