DEVONSHIRE. 369 worked regularly at my pillow after sixteen years of age. Delighted to exhibit the craft of his boyhood, he hunted out his patterns, and, setting to work, produced a piece of trolly edging, which soon found a place in the albums of sundry lace-collecting ladies, the last specimen of man-worked lace likely to he fabricated in the county of Devon. In Woodbury will be found a small colony of lace-makers who are employed in making Maltese or Greek lace, an industry intro duced into Devon by order of her late majesty the queen dowager, on her return from Malta. The workers copy these coarse geo metric laces with great facility and precision. Among the various cheap articles to which the Devonshire workers have of late directed their labours is the tape or braid lace. A good lace-maker easily gains her shilling a day, but in most parts of Devonshire the work is paid by the truck system; many of the more respectable shops giving one half in money, the remaining sixpence to be taken out in tea or clothing, sold often considerably above their value. Other manufacturers—to their shame be it told—pay their workers altogether in grocery, and should the lace-maker, from illness or any other cause, require an advance in cash, she is compelled to give work to the value of fourteenpence for every shilling she receives. Some few houses, such as that of Mrs. Treadwin, of Exeter, and others of London, pay their workers in money. When we consider that well-nigh the whole female population of Devon is employed in lace-making, it is a matter of surprise that its staple manufacture should receive but little encourage ment from the resident gentry of the county, and that (so different from the energy of the ladies of Ireland) not one should have been found to improve by her taste the artistic combination of the fabric. But the air is soft and balmy, and the inhabitants an apathetic generation, alone to be roused by famine, or some like calamity, from the natural somnolence of theii existence.