The bricklayers are at work, as I supposed. You see they are standing on a scaffold, which consists of upright poles, to which two or more poles are fastened horizontally at one end, while the other end is fixed in the wall. On these flat boards are laid to form a kind of floor. Each bricklayer has the mortar at his right foot, and the bricks at his left. On the ground is the labourer making the mortar; the board upon which he carries it up that ladder is called a hod. The mortar is made of a kind of stone called lime, which has been burnt in a round furnace called a limekiln; look, he pours water upon it, and it cracks, and it sends forth a vapour, and heat is produced; the stones now fall to pieces into a kind of wetted powder, and he makes a paste of them, adding a little sand or gravel.

The materials used by bricklayers are bricks, tiles, mortar, laths, or thin, long slips of wood, nails, and tile pins, a kind of nails or pegs made to fasten the tiles. Their tools are a brick-trowel, to take up and spread the mortar; a brick-axe to cut bricks to a proper size and shape; a saw which is sometimes requisite for their work; a stone on which to rub the bricks smooth, when great exactness is necessary; a square to lay evenly the bed or foundation of a wall; a level with which the under sides of bricks are cut to any required angle, and two sides of which move on a joint so as to be set to any angle; a banker, which is a piece of timber about six feet long, and laid on two other pieces of timber, three feet high from the floor on which they stand, on this they cut the bricks; line-pins and a line are

used to lay the rows of bricks exactly even; a plumb rule, that is a piece of lead supended by a cord in a wooden frame, by means of which they try whether their work be upright as they go on with it, and a level or two pieces of wood, or metal, at right angles; a rammer of heavy wood, to beat the foundation close and firm; an iron crow, a pick-axe and shovel, to clear away opposing obstacles.

Bricks are made of clay, with which are mixed coal-ashes. There are two kinds of bricks, stockbricks and place-bricks; stock-bricks are the hardest and most burnt, and are used for the outside of walls, while with place-bricks the middle and inside work is done.

A good bricklayer with his labourer, will lay in a single day about a thousand bricks, in what is called whole and solid work, when the wall is a brick and a half or two bricks thick.

We are come now to the stone mason, or stone cutter's yard. His business is to hew or square stones and marble, and to cut them for the purposes of building. His tools are the square, the level, the plumb line, the bevel, the compasses, the hammer, the chisel, the mallet, or large wooden hammer, the saw and the trowel.

You see there is one man carving a stone with a mallet and chisel; take care, do not go too near to him, for the splinters fly about, which may give you a hard blow, or perhaps get into your eyes.

That other man is sawing into thin pieces a large block of stone. The stone mason's saw is different from the carpenter's; it has no teeth,

and is moved backwards and forwards by one man, and cuts the stone by its own weight; he wets the stone with water that the saw may work more easily. Marble takes a very fine polish, and is therefore in great repute for ornaments of buildings, statues, tombs, chimney pieces and tablets; Portland stone, which comes from Portland isle, in Dorsetshire, where there are vast quarries of it, is very much used by masons; it is applied to buildings in general, to copings at the tops of houses and walls, to window cills, to stone balusters, to steps and paving, where great neatness or ornament is required; when it comes out of the quarry this stone is very soft, and works easily, but becomes hard by long exposure to the air; the piers and arches of Westminster bridge, and the magnificent cathedral of St. Paul's, are built of this stone.

For cementing or joining stones fast together, stone masons make use of mortar, which I just now described to you; plaster of Paris, made by burning a kind of stone called gypsum, and for lining cisterns, wells, and other reservoirs of water; a sort of coarse plaster named tarrass, formed of a soft rock stone found principally on the banks of the river Rhine, and manufactured in Holland.

LESSON XIII.

HERE we are returned home and dinner is not yet ready; suppose we employ the intermediate

time in reading. We ought all of us to be thankful to God for having brought us into life, and for having given us the valuable powers and faculties we possess; and we have every reason to be contented with the different situations in which his good and wise providence places us. And yet some people are always dissatisfied with what they have, and wishing for what they have not. I have here, in this book, written by a sensible and amiable man, who was justly called the friend of children, a very pretty history, that shows the folly of extravagant wishes. You shall read it.

A good papa, named Mr. Brown, and his two boys, Charles and William, were talking together one day in which they had been to see a giant, or an extraordinarily large man. Charles cried out suddenly, "I wish I was as tall as the giant we have seen to-day." "As tall as that giant," said William; "I wish I was as high as our Cherry tree."

Mr. B. Why do you wish that, William ?

William. Because then I should have no need either of ladder or pole to get at the cherries when they are ripe. Only think, brother, how delightful it would be to hold one's head above all the trees in the orchard when walking through it! To be able to pick apples and pears as easily as we do currants and gooseberries! That would be no great misfortune.

Charles. And then we might look in at the windows of the second stories of houses, and see what the people in the rooms were doing. What a fine fright we might throw them into!

William. I should not be any longer afraid of

the carriages, as I am going through the streets. I should only have to straddle my legs out wide, and I should see horses and coachmen, coach and servants, running between them. I should laugh at them all finely.

Charles. You know the little river that runs at the bottom of our garden. Well, we should not want a boat, then, to pass over it, or be obliged to go half a mile about to the village bridge. Why, with one good jump, we should be on the other side.

Let

William. And then if we were so much larger, we should be as much stronger too. a bear or a wolf meet me, then, in a forest, and instead of running away, or being eaten up by the rough-skinned fellow, I should twist his neck like I would a pigeon's; or I should toss him a couple of hundred feet up into the air; and, I believe, he would be so occupied by his fall, that he would forget to get up again.

Charles. We should not want oxen any more to till the ground; we should draw the plough along ourselves, and, in ten steps, we should be at the end of the field. The other day I saw more than fifty men driving piles for the foundation of a causeway. How hard they were working! Well, with such a huge great hammer, as we should then be able to handle, a single man might do all their work in one day. Is not that true, papa?

Mr. Brown. This is very fine talking! Yet, with all your famous wishes, you are a pretty pair of blockheads.