A cartridge and bullet-shop sometimes is as animated and as picturesque as an open-air market under a southern sky. I remember such a shop where the girls were in various factory costumes, some at the machines in khaki and some in cream-coloured overalls and caps; some, who were 'trucking', or removing the product in boxes, were in cream trouser-suits, with smart head-dresses fashioned from brightly-coloured oriental handkerchiefs. In between the rows of girls men in dark suits were passing to and fro, now stopping to examine, or alter a machine and now taking up a box of bullets and pouring out its glittering contents like a silver stream, so that the output from each worker might be weighed and assessed. Through an open door, at one side of the shop, one could see other men, like stern magicians, dropping cartridges into vats of acid, and just to the side of the vats I caught sight of two girls vigorously shaking a sack of cartridges, hot from the furnace. As they shook, they sang an army refrain: 'Take me back to dear old Blighty,' with a chorus of laughter. At the extreme end of the shop, near the door whence the product made its exit, were long narrow tables, piled with bullets, reminding one of a haul of silver sprats on the quay-side. These were the inspecting tables where the bullets receive minute attention from women viewers. The women's work in the bullet-shop is of extraordinary interest to the onlooker, although many of the processes must be infinitely more monotonous, from the worker's standpoint, than operations in other munitions productions. The elongation of the little metal vessel, resembling an acorn-cup, into a full-length cartridge, or bullet, necessitates many operations in which the dexterity of human fingers and the ingenuity of the machine both come into play. In the shop I recall, in one machine employed for semi-annealing, the cartridge was being 'fed' into a metal revolving plate. This passed behind an asbestos screen into a double row of gas jets, where the semi-annealing or hardening process was being accomplished. The dexterity of the operators was so great that one woman was often feeding two machines, apparently without effort, and never missed placing the cartridge into the correct aperture in the revolving plate. In another process, I watched young girls sitting round a table and placing bullets into circular apertures in small trays, resembling solitaire-boards. Many of the girls were working with such speed that it was impossible to follow the movements of their fingers, but they, unconscious of their prowess, worked with averted heads, smiling in amusement at the visitor's astonishment.