The mud from which the bricks are made is collected quite simply, but ingeniously, in pens carefully constructed along the Parret’s banks. These “slime-batches,” as they are named, are brick-built enclosures, so arranged that the mud-charged tide flows into them at every flood, the mud settling down during the interval of ebb. Thus with every recurring tide a new deposit is added; the “batches” being filled in the course of two or three months, according to the time of year. This accumulation, grown hard in all this time, is dug out, generally in the winter, and removed to the banks, whence it is taken as required to the pug-mills, in which it is mixed with water and thus tempered to a putty-like consistency. Then it is ready for the moulder, that is to say, the actual brickmaker, who, after the identical fashion followed by the moulder of ordinary bricks, takes his lumps of material, throws them into a wooden framework made to the gauge of a brick, scrapes off the surplus clay from the top and pushes the raw brick aside, as one of a rapidly growing row. The rapidity with which a moulder does his work is astonishing to the unaccustomed onlooker. A workman of average excellence can thus shape four hundred bricks an hour. The clammy slabs of clay thus formed are then taken by the “bearer-off” and placed in the “hacks”—that is to say, long stands—with a slight tile roofing, to dry. The tiled protection is to shield the unbaked bricks from being partly dissolved by possible rainstorms. The final operations are the stacking into kilns and the burning, carried out precisely in the same manner as the burning of bricks to be used in building. The river Parret—in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle styled “Pedridan”—is in other ways a river of considerable importance to North Somerset. Like the Avon at Bristol, it runs out towards the sea in its last few miles more like a deep and muddy gutter at low water than in the likeness of a river; but the Parret mud, as we have already seen, is at least useful, and a source of wealth to Bridgwater; and shipping of considerable tonnage, bringing chiefly coals from South Wales, and deals from Norway, comes up the estuary to Bridgwater’s quays.