Here you may hear their clatter night and day upon a thousand anvils.

O, Vale of Vulcan! O, Valley of Knives! Was ever a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere, that did not carry in the first pocket made for him one of thy cheap blades?
Did ever a reaper in the Old World or New cut and bind a sheaf of grain, who did not wield one of thy famous sickles?
All Americans who were boys forty years ago, will remember three English centres of peculiar interest to them.

These were Sheffield, Colebrook Dale, and Paternoster Row.

There was hardly a house or log cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi which could not show the imprint of these three places, on the iron tea-kettle, the youngest boy's Barlow knife, and his younger sister's picture-book.
To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield was a huge jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge-pot, and Paternoster Row a psalm-book, each in the generative case.

How we young reapers used to discuss the comparative merits and meanings of those mysterious letters on our sickles, B.Y and I.R! What were they?
Were they beginnings of words, or whole words themselves?
Did they stand for things, qualities, or persons?
"Mine is a _By_ sickle; mine is an _Ir_ one.