HAL.—Most willingly. I have even made a hook, which, though a little inferior in form, in other respects, I think, I could boast as equal to the Limerick ones. The first requisite in hook-making is to find good malleable iron of the softest and purest kind—such as is procured from the nails of old horse-shoes. This must be converted by cementation with charcoal into good soft steel, and that into bars or wires of different thickness for different sized hooks, and then annealed. For the larger hooks, the bars must be made in such a form as to admit of cutting the barbs; and each piece, which serves for two hooks, is larger at the ends, so that the bar appears in the form of a double pointed spear, three, four, or five inches long: the bars for the finer hooks are somewhat flattened. The artist works with two files, one finer than the other for giving the point and polishing the hook, and he begins by making the barb, taking care not to cut too deep, and filing on a piece of hard wood, such as box wood, with a dent to receive the bar, made by the edge of the file. The barb being made, the shank is thinned and flattened, and the polishing file applied to it; and by a turn of the wrist round a circular pincers, the necessary degree of curvature is given to it. The hook is then cut from the bar, heated red hot, by being kept for a moment in a charcoal fire; then plunged, while hot, into cold water; then tempered, by being put on iron, that has been heated in the same fire till it becomes a bright blue, and, whilst still hot, it is immersed in candle-grease, where it gains a black colour; it is then finished. PHYS.—Nothing seems simpler than this process. Surely London might furnish manufacturers for so easy a manipulation; and I should think one of our friends, who is so admirable a cutler, might even improve upon the Irish process; at least the tempering might be more scientifically arranged; for instance, by the thermometer, and a bath of fusible metal, the temperature at which steel becomes blue being 580° Fahrenheit, might be constantly preserved. HAL.—Habit teaches our Irish artists this point with sufficient precision. We should have such hooks in England, but the object of the fishing tackle makers is to obtain them cheap, and most of their hooks are made to sell, and good hooks cannot be sold but at a good price. POIET.—I have heard formerly a good angler complain, that the Limerick hooks were too heavy and clumsy. He preferred hooks made at Kendal in Cumberland.