Carefully supported, however, the blade is again subjected to the fiery ordeal until it attains a slaty blue colour, and a beautiful and elastic temper, which has been partially secured by the previous hammering. By the process of forging it has become about six inches longer than the pristine steel shape, and by the tempering it has attained a springy strength which enables it to be bent in a curve sufficient to bring the hand five inches nearer to the point than when the blade is straight. Many of the best bayonets are forged in the same way as the sword-blades, and, as in almost every manufacturing process, human intelligence has an unmistakable advantage over mere mechanical force, these possess some superior qualities. The greater number of bayonets, however, are made from a square bar of drawn steel, five inches and a half long by nine-sixteenths square. This bar is passed between a series of about sixteen pairs of rollers, which are worked by steam power, and so grooved as gradually to mould the blade to the required shape. Sixteen times the short steel bar undergoes the merciless pressure of a progressively-increased power, until its length is increased from five and a half to twenty-six inches, when some portion is cut off from the point to leave it the regulation length. The matchets, which are made from bevel-edged steel, passed twice through the rollers, are cut into the requisite shape by means of powerful shears. [Illustration: Steam Hammer.] These operations are conducted in a large shed, where the rollers stand like awful combinations of infernal machines and patent mangles; where a boding and vengeful tilt-hammer, worked by steam, is tended by a man, who sits like a calm fate beside its crushing bulk, and supplies it with fresh victims; where the awful boom seems to shatter the very atmosphere, and deafness reigns triumphant. In obedience to a signal, however, the monster is suddenly stopped, and we are enabled to hear that the great two-pot furnace on our left is used for making the steel from those long laths of bevel-edged iron stacked against the wall; that the furnace is constructed with wide flues on each side and under the bottom, while the fire-grate occupies the centre between the two pots; that the pots themselves are some four feet deep, and two feet and a half wide, are airtight, contain layers of charcoal and iron covered with loam sand, will remain seven days and nights in the furnace, until their contents are white hot, and that at the end of that time the iron will have been converted into steel of a slaty-blue colour. The inexorable hammer resuming its work at this point, we follow the bayonet to its completion, and once more visit the forges, to witness the “shutting on” or welding the blade to a piece of iron, which ultimately forms the socket by which the bayonet itself is fixed on to the barrel of the rifle or musket.