There are exceptions, but as a general rule, after a hard day’s work, a man is not inclined for study of any kind, least of all for the investigation of abstract sciences; and thus it is that at Wolverton library, novels are much more in demand than scientific treatises.

In Summer, when walks in the fields are pleasant, and men can work in their gardens, the demand for books of any kind falls off.

Turning from the library to the mechanics’ institution, pure science is not found to have many charms for the mechanics of Wolverton.  Geological and astronomical lectures are ill attended, while musical entertainments, dissolving views, and dramatic recitations are popular.

It must be confessed that dulness and monotony exercise a very unfavourable influence on this comfortable colony.  The people, not being Quakers, are not content without amusement.  They receive their appointed wages regularly, so that they have not even the amusement of making and losing money.  It would be an excellent thing for the world if the kind, charitable, cold-blooded people of middle age, or with middle-aged heads and hearts, who think that a population may be ruled into an every-day life of alternate work, study, and constitutional walks, without anything warmer than a weak simper from year’s end to year’s end, would consult the residents of Wolverton and Crewe before planning their next parallelogram.

We commend to amateur actors, who often need an audience, the idea of an occasional trip to Wolverton.  The audience would be found indulgent of very indifferent performances.

But to turn from generalities to the specialities for which Wolverton is distinguished, we will walk round the workshops by which a rural parish has been colonised and reduced to a town shape.

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Wolverton workshops.—­To attempt a description of the workshops of Wolverton without the aid of diagrams and woodcuts would be a very unsatisfactory task.  It is enough to say that they should be visited not only by those who are specially interested in machinery, but by all who would know what mechanical genius, stimulated as it has been to the utmost during the last half century, by the execution of profitable inventions, has been able to effect.

At Wolverton may be seen collected together in companies, each under command of its captains or foremen, in separate workshops, some hundreds of the best handicraftsmen that Europe can produce, all steadily at work, not without noise, yet without confusion.  Among them are a few men advanced in life of the old generation; there are men of middle age; young men trained with all the manual advantages of the old generation, and all the book and lecture privileges of the present time; and then there are the rising generation of apprentices—­the sons of steam and of railroads.  Among all it would be difficult to find a bad-shaped head, or a stupid face—­as for a drunkard