Here is something wonderful enough, on our very entrance. Here is a silver pencil-case, neat and serviceable, though not of the most elegant form; handsome enough to have been praised for its looks, thirty years ago. This pencil-case carries two feet of lead. It is intended to be the commercial traveller's joy and treasure. It will last him his life, unless he take an unconscionable amount of orders. Unscrewing the top, we see that the upper end of the tube is divided into compartments,--which look like the mouth of a revolver; and here, protected from each other, the leads are bestowed, safe--despite their great length, through their owner's roughest travelling. Some drawers in a counter are pulled out. One is divided into compartments, each of which holds a handful of something different from all the rest. This drawer contains one hundred gross of pencil-cases in parts; the tube, the rack and barrel, the propelling wire, the slide, the top, the various chambers, and screws, and niceties. In another drawer, there is a dazzling and beautiful heap of pure amethysts and topazes from far countries, of vast aggregate value: and, farther on, we see the elegant onyx and white cornelian from South America (a very recent importation), and the sardonyx, now in high favor for seals and the tops of pencil-cases. Its delicate layer of white upon red, (or the reverse,) the undermost color coming out in the engraving, makes it singularly fit for the purpose. Then, there is a paperful of small turquoises, which are poured out and handled like a sample of lentils. These are from Persia; and they have to be re-cut in England, the Persian tools being of the roughest. Then, there are bloodstones, and pebbles out of number, and pints of glittering fragments of Californian gold; rich materials tossed together, to be drawn out for use at the bidding of capricious fashion; for, fashion seems to be as capricious here, among these stones and ores that have required cycles of ages to compose, as in the milliner's shop, where the materials are drawn from the pods of a season and the insects of a summer. On shelves against the walls, are ranged rows and piles of steel dies,--that pretty and costly piece of apparatus, which we find in almost all these manufactories--together with the inexhaustible stamping and cutting machines, the blow-pipe, the borax, and soft metal for solder, the pumice-stone and wirebed, the turning wheel, the circular saw, and the bath of diluted aquafortis, and the pan of box-wood sawdust, in which the pretty things are dried when they come out of "pickle." From buttons to epergnes, we find this apparatus every where. The steel dies are an everlasting study: the block, like the conical weight of a pair of warehouse scales, seeming very large for the little figure indented in the upper surface. Here, in this manufactory, the figures are of the bugle, a favorite form of watch-key--the deer's foot, (a pretty study