Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/146

 were so easy and so mechanical a business to "make money" in one's daily doings. And then it strikes us: What do these men, with their usually grimy aprons and often blackened faces, get for their work in turning out so much coin of the realm? They seem to have a very good time of it on the whole, and the conditions of light, warmth, and safety under which they labour are certainly in striking contrast to the trials, the dangers, and the dreariness of the lives of those who unearth the metal.

On an average, each workman in the operative department of the Mint makes his £2 10s. a week. He enters the service of the department as a boy, and remains there through his working life, if he cares to do so and proves trustworthy. No one is accepted for employment after sixteen years of age, and every precaution is taken by the authorities against the weakness of human nature. Each room is under a separate official, without whose assistance in the unlocking of doors no employé can leave.

There is no hardship in this daily imprisonment, every department being fitted up with all conveniences for cooking, eating, &c.; and, judging from what we have seen, we should say the lives of the operatives at the Mint are not unenviable. Of one thing we can speak very positively, and that is as to their natures: their geniality is a characteristic they share in common with their chief superintendent. If one had seriously contemplated becoming an operative, they could not have taken more pains to initiate one into the mysteries of the coinage.

We now make our way to the Annealing-room Here the scene changes entirely. The buzz, the whirr, and bang of the all powerful machinery give place to several furnaces. The blanks are brought in in bags, are emptied into an iron tray, and shoved along an elongated sort of oven, of which our illustration gives an excellent impression. It shows the man standing with the iron rod and hook in hand ready to push the tray to the farther end of the oven.

We venture modestly to suggest that the structure would do admirably for the purposes of cremation.

"Quite right, sir, it would! I suppose you wouldn't like to try it?"

We frankly and honestly confess we should not.

After a few minutes the blanks are sufficiently baked. If one's own valuable carcase had been in that red-hot oven for ever so short a time, it would have come out charred and hardened. Not so the metal, which is considerably softened.

The blanks are now tipped into a perforated sort of basin, which is picked up by a man from another room and carried away.

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,