We have during all this time been standing in a heat which would do credit to a Turkish bath. But now, again, the conditions change entirely, and we are in a room filled with steam, and cold enough to refrigerate one. Here the blanks are plunged into a tank of cold water, which hisses and spits like a dozen angry snakes as the hot metal touches it. From the cooling bath the blanks go to the acid bath. Into this latter they disappear black with the oxide of copper clinging to them. Pears' Soap or Sapolio, or whatever means to cleanliness we may employ, would hardly accomplish the wonders in an hour's application to the human skin, which a few seconds of the sulphuric solution accomplishes with the blank of the coin. They emerge from their bath in every sense white as snow. The blanks are, of course, wet, and before they can assume the full honours of the complete coin they have to be dried. How is this done? By blowing on them with a bellows? By wiping each blank separately with a cloth? By placing them in front of a fire or even in the oven again? No. They are simply emptied into a revolving box containing beech-wood sawdust. A turn about in this, and they and the sawdust are emptied into a sieve, from which the sawdust escapes with a little shaking. The sawdust is dried on a hot slab or bench, and is used again; the blanks are ready for the Press or Die room. In the illustration of this room the man is standing with a handful of blanks feeding a small tube or shoot, from which they drop on to a sliding plate and are conveyed into a collar, as it is called. We see the piece a blank for the last time. Once in the collar, if the machinery is in motion, nothing can save that smooth-faced blank from becoming, in appearance at least, a coin of the realm. The blank rests on a die and beneath a die. The latter descends with precision and force, and the blank finds itself for an instant in a grip more powerful than miser ever gave his hoard. It would, if it could, spread itself out to the thinnest possible substance. But as it seeks to escape under the pressure its edge comes in contact with the sides of the collar. These are milled or lettered, and whatever they contain appears on the coin. It is not generally known that the object of this milling or lettering is to prevent the clipping or debasement of the money. In Queen Elizabeth's time, and on to the reign of William III.--during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--the operations of the clippers were very serious. Men made fortunes by paring a small piece from every coin in their possession, and even the death penalty failed to check the evil. A year or two before the beginning of the eighteenth century a mill, worked by horses, was started in the Tower of London to replace the old system of making money by the hand-wielded hammer. The edge of the coin was made to bear an inscription, and the operations of the clipper were rendered practically impossible. Even to-day offences in