Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/466

 work. A good hand can roll a gross of cases a day—a boy industriously pasting the paper, which at the same time he energetically rolls. Here, too, the shells are made—great explosive balls which vary in diameter from three and a half inches to twenty-five inches. These are used for large Government displays and State occasions. The biggest of these will turn the scale at two and a quarter hundredweights, and when it bursts its débris covers a radius of a quarter of a mile from the bursting point. It costs £50 to fire one. Such a huge shell, however, has only been exploded on two occasions, both of which were at Lisbon—the first in 1886, when the Crown Prince of Portugal was married, and again on the visit of the King and Queen of Sweden to the Portuguese capital in 1888. The 1886 display cost £3,500, and the fireworks were let off on the River Tagus, when thirteen men-of-war, troopships, and hulks were called into service. The second display cost £3,000, and these are the two most expensive on record.

Shells are made in a mould of plaster of Paris or metal. The two halves are manufactured separately, with forty or fifty layers of brown paper for a medium-sized shell, securely pasted together. A hole is left for the fuse, and then the two separate pieces are joined into the round with glue. Look in at the dry rolling shed, where a little army of young women are busy making coloured lights. They sit at slate tables, with paste-pot and brush handy, and piles of paper in front of them cut to a square about the size sufficient to hold half-an-ounce of tobacco. The thin rolls of paper are shaped with a steel rod, and are used for the great set pieces. A girl can roll twenty gross of cases for coloured lights in a day. In a corner of this room is a good lady who has made fire balloons for the last twenty years. She can turn out three a day, and when it is remembered that a fire-balloon stands 14 ft. high, has a capacity for holding 400 ft. of gas, and that no fewer than 112 pieces of paper take part in its construction, we are inclined to single her out as a very champion of balloon-makers.

The store-rooms of the Japanese lanterns form an interesting building. Fifty thousand lanterns are imported from Japan every year, at prices ranging from a farthing to ten shillings each. At the present moment 25,000 are stored away in immense bins—total darkness is necessary so as to retain the colour—and we are assured by our guide that every one