In the final burnishing room, we observe a row of chemists's globes--glass vases filled with water, ranged on a shelf. A stranger might guess long before he would find out what these are for. They are to reflect a concentrated blaze from the gas-lights in the evening, to point out specks and dimnesses, to the eyes and fingers of the burnishers. What curious finger-ends they have--those women who chafe the precious metals into their last degree of polish! They are broad--the joint so flexible that it is bent considerably backwards when in use; and the skin has a peculiar smoothness: more mechanical, we fancy, than vital. However that may be, the burnish they produce is strikingly superior to any hitherto achieved by friction with any other substance. In departing, the sense of contrast comes over us once more. We have just seen all manner of elegancies in ornament, from the classical and dignified to the minute, fanciful, and grotesque; in going out, we give a look to the unfinished engine-house, and the smiths' shop. All this hard work; all those many dwellings thrown into one establishment; all these scores of men, and women, and children, busy from year's end to year's end; all those diggers far away in California; all those lapidaries in Germany; all those engineers in their studies; all those ironmasters in their markets; all those miners in the bowels of the earth--all are enlisted in making gold chains; and some of us have no more knowledge and no more thought than to call the product "Brummagem shams!" Well! the price charged for them in London shops, where they are as good as French, is something real; and it is a real comfort to think how swingingly some fine folks pay, though the bulk of the profit comes, not to the manufacturer, but to the middlemen. Of these middlemen there are always two; the factor and the shopkeeper--often more. Their intervention is very useful, of course, or they would not exist; but somebody or other makes a prodigious profit of Birmingham jewelry, after it has left the manufacturer's hands. It was only yesterday that we saw, among a rich heap of wonderful things, a pair of elegant bracelets--foreign pebbles, beautifully set. We were told the wholesale price they were to be sold for; which was half the shop price. The transference to the London shop was to cost as much as the whole of the previous processes: from the digging of the silver and the collecting of the pebbles, through all the needful voyages and travels, to the burnishing and packing at Birmingham!