The combustible materials used in the manufacture render the process an unsafe one. It cannot be carried on in the heart of towns without being regarded as a common nuisance. We must therefore go somewhere in the suburbs of London to find such a trade. In the neighbourhood of Bethnal Green there is a large open space called Wisker’s Gardens. This is not a place of courts and alleys, but a considerable area, literally divided into small gardens, where just now the crocus and the snowdrop are telling hopefully of the springtime. Each garden has the smallest of cottages—for the most part wooden—which have been converted from summer-houses into dwellings. The whole place reminds one of numberless passages in the old dramatists, in which the citizens’ wives are described in their garden-houses of Finsbury, or Hogsden, sipping syllabub and talking fine on summer holidays. In one of these garden-houses, not far from the public road, is the little factory of ‘Henry Lester, Patentee of the Domestic Safety Match-box,’ as his label proclaims. He is very ready to show his processes, which in many respects are curious and interesting. Adam Smith has instructed us that the business of making a pin is divided into about eighteen distinct operations; and further, that ten persons could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day with the division of labour; while if they had all wrought independently and separately, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty. The Lucifer Match is a similar example of division of labour, and the skill of long practice. At a separate factory, where there is a steam engine, not the refuse of the carpenter’s shop, but the best Norway deals are cut into splints by machinery, and are supplied to the matchmaker. These little pieces, beautifully accurate in their minute squareness, and in their precise length of five inches, are made up into bundles, each of which contains eighteen hundred. They are daily brought on a truck to the dipping-house, as it is called—the average number of matches finished off daily requiring two hundred of these bundles. Up to this point we have had several hands employed in the preparation of the match, in connection with the machinery that cuts the wood. Let us follow one of these bundles through the subsequent processes. Without being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur. When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur, must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy sitting on the floor, with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of a mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. In the best matches the process of sulphur-dipping and dusting is repeated. They have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces