At a short distance towards the south we entered a beautiful building, lighted during the day by plate-glass in the roof, by gas at night, and warmed by steam. In its centre there stands a narrow elevated platform, whereon travels a small locomotive, which brings into the building, and deposits on thirteen sets of rails on each side, twenty-six locomotive engines for examination and repair. On the outside, in the open air, we found at work what is called “_a scrap drum_” which by revolving cleans scraps of old rusty iron, just as a public school improves awkward boys by hardly rubbing them one against another. The scrap iron, after having been by this discipline divested of its rust, is piled on a small wooden board for further schooling, and when sufficiently hot the glowing mass is placed under a steam-hammer alongside, whose blows, each equal to about ten tons, very shortly belabour to “equality and fraternity” the broken bolts, bars, nuts, nails, screw-pins, bits of plate-iron, &c., which are thus economically welded into a solid mass or commonwealth. In another smelting-shop, 150 feet in length, we saw at work fourteen forges, six turning-lathes, one drilling-machine, and one iron-shaving machine. Lastly, there are gas-works for supplying the whole of the Company’s establishment with about seventy or eighty thousand cubic feet of gas per day. The above is but a faint outline of the Company’s hospital at Wolverton for the repair and maintenance merely of their locomotive engines running between London and Birmingham. The magnitude of the establishment will best speak for itself; but as our readers, like ourselves, are no doubt tired almost to death of the clanking of anvils--of the whizzing of machinery--of the disagreeable noises created by the cutting, shaving, turning, and planing of iron--of the suffocating fumes in the brass-foundry, in the smelting-houses, in the gas-works--and lastly of the stunning blows of the great steam-hammer--we beg leave to offer them a cup of black tea at the Company’s public refreshment-room, in order that, while they are blowing, sipping, and enjoying the beverage, we may briefly explain to them the nature of this beautiful little oasis in the desert. _Wolverton Refreshment-Room._