this period the same women find employment in gathering and marketing vegetables, at lower wages, for other sixty days, netting about 5_l_. more.  With this poor pittance they return to their native county, and it adds either to their humble comforts, or creates a small dowry towards a rustic establishment for life.  Can a more interesting picture be drawn of virtuous exertion?  Why have our poets failed to colour and finish it?  More virtue never existed in their favourite shepherdesses than in these Welsh and Shropshire girls!  For beauty, symmetry, and complexion, they are not inferior to the nymphs of Arcadia, and they far outvie the pallid specimens of Circassia!  Their morals too are exemplary; and they often perform this labour to support aged parents, or to keep their own children from the workhouse!  In keen suffering, they endure all that the imagination of a poet could desire; they live hard, they sleep on straw in hovels and barns, and they often burst an artery, or drop down dead from the effect of heat and over-exertion!  Yet, such is the state of one portion of our female population, at a time when we are calling ourselves the most polished nation on earth.

* * * * *

COLEBROOK-DALE IRON-WORKS—­THE REYNOLDS’.

(To the Editor of the Mirror.)

In the interesting extract you have given in your excellent Miscellany (No. 321) from Bakewell’s Introduction to Geology, when speaking of the exhausted or impoverished state of the iron-ore and coals in Shropshire, &c., an allusion is made in a note to that truly excellent man, the late Mr. Richard Reynolds, and to the final extinction of the furnaces at Colebrook-Dale, which is not altogether correct.

I beg leave, therefore, to point out the errors to you, and to add a fact or two more relating to that distinguished philanthropist and his family, which, perhaps, will not be unacceptable to many of your readers.

Mr. Reynolds was by no means the original, nor, I believe, ever the sole proprietor, of the iron-works in Colebrook-Dale, as stated by Mr. Bakewell; he derived his right in them from his wife’s family the Darbies; and the firm of “Darby and Company” was the well known mark on the iron from these works for a very long period; more recently, that of “Colebrook-Dale Company” was adopted.

The Darbies were an old and respectable family of the Society of Friends, and a pair of the elder branches of it were the original “Darby and Joan,” whose names are so well known throughout the whole kingdom.  I had this anecdote from one of the sons of Mr. Reynolds,[7] and have no doubt of its authenticity.

It may not be generally known to your readers, perhaps, that the first iron bridge in England was projected at, and cast from, the furnaces of Colebrook-Dale, and erected over the Severn, near that place, about the year 1779; and, considering it to be the first bridge of the kind, I feel little hesitation in stating it to be, even now, the most beautiful one.  This structure, at that time thought to be a wonderful attempt, was the entire offspring of Mr. Reynolds’ genius; it was planned, cast, and erected, under his immediate care and superintendance.