_s._ _d._ Single barrel, ribbed and breeched 3 8 Lock 0 9 Wood for stock 0 6 Stocking 0 8 Furniture 0 4 Screwing together 1 4 Percussioning 0 9 Polishing and engraving 0 6 Varnishing and painting stock 0 4 Painting twisted barrel 0 3 Rod, tip, worm 0 4 Small work 0 4 -------- Total 10 9 -------- The above guns are sold to the factor, at 20_l._ and 12_l._ the score respectively. The Jews sometimes get even them at that, or a lower price, as money happens to be plentiful or scarce. There is a description of tradesmen in this town of hardware, whose establishments bear the euphonious titles of the “_slaughter shop_” and “_blood house_;” and in these emporiums of the productions of the needy; may be obtained gunnery of all kinds, as well as all other material, the productions of Birmingham. If the article costs little manufacturing, it costs these men still less. The slaughter-master is a cormorant, who swallows the substance of the weak, and once past his awful jaws he cannot be made to disgorge. Here itinerant hardwaremen find an abundant supply: he has always a stock. The wants of the poor are always pressing, and the gun-making portions of the inhabitants of Birmingham are not _over provident_, seldom caring for what to-morrow may bring forth. The painted pair of shams is faintly portrayed in the opposite engraving (Plate 4); and the uninitiated may be able to detect what I have endeavoured to acquaint them with. [Illustration: _PLATE. IV._ CHARCOAL IRON BARRELED GUN THREEPENNY IRON BARRELED GUN] [Illustration: _PLATE. V._ TWOPENNY IRON BARRELED GUN A SHAM DAMN BARRELED GUN] I shall just give the cost of the various items in the fitting-up of an imitation gun for the African market, combined with an _imitation_ musket for the same; the former is not so desperately bad as the latter, the one being barely half an inch in the bore, the other full three-quarters of an inch, and yet their weights are not dissimilar. You can have a shipload of these for 5_s._ 9_d._ each. It is satisfactory to know that they send powder with them of _corresponding quality_. _Cost of “African guns” alias “Park Paling.”_