In another building, provided with steam power, which performs much of the labor, is carried on the great work of manufacturing photographic albums, cases for portraits, parts of cameras, and of printing pictures from negatives.  Many of these branches of work are very interesting.  The luxurious album, embossed, clasped, gilded, resplendent as a tropical butterfly, goes through as many transformations as a “purple emperor”.  It begins a pasteboard larva, is swathed and pressed and glued into the condition of a chrysalis, and at last alights on the centre table gorgeous in gold and velvet, the perfect imago.  The cases for portraits are made in lengths, and cut up, somewhat as they say ships are built in Maine, a mile at a time, to be afterwards sawed across so as to become sloops, schooners, or such other sized craft as may happen to be wanted.

Each single process in the manufacture of elaborate products of skill often times seems and is very simple.  The workmen in large establishments, where labor is greatly subdivided, become wonderfully adroit in doing a fraction of something.  They always remind us of the Chinese or the old Egyptians.  A young person who mounts photographs on cards all day long confessed to having never, or almost never, seen a negative developed, though standing at the time within a few feet of the dark closet where the process was going on all day long.  One forlorn individual will perhaps pass his days in the single work of cleaning the glass plates for negatives.  Almost at his elbow is a toning bath, but he would think it a good joke, if you asked him whether a picture had lain long enough in the solution of gold or hyposulphite.

We always take a glance at the literature which is certain to adorn the walls in the neighborhood of each operative’s bench or place for work.  Our friends in the manufactory we are speaking of were not wanting in this respect.  One of the girls had pasted on the wall before her,

    “Kind words can never die.”

It would not have been easy to give her a harsh one after reading her chosen maxim.  “The Moment of Parting” was twice noticed.  “The Haunted Spring”, “Dearest May”, “The Bony Boat”, “Yankee Girls”, “Yankee Ship and Yankee Crew”, “My Country, ’tis of thee”, and—­was there ever anybody that ever broke up prose into lengths who would not look to see if there were not a copy of some performance of his own on the wall he was examining, if he were exploring the inner chamber of a freshly opened pyramid?

We left the great manufacturing establishment of the Messrs. Anthony, more than ever impressed with the vast accession of happiness which has come to mankind through this art, which has spread itself as widely as civilization.  The photographer can procure every article needed for his work at moderate cost and in quantities suited to his wants.  His prices have consequently come down to such a point that pauperism