It results from this system that to make any change, however slight, in the pattern of the musket or in the form of any of the parts of it, is attended with great difficulty and expense. The fashion and form of every one of the component portions of the arm, are very exactly and rigidly determined by the machinery that is employed in making it, and any alteration, however apparently insignificant, would require a change in this machinery. It becomes necessary, therefore, that the precise pattern both of the whole musket and of all of its parts, once fixed, should remain permanently the same.
The most costly of the parts which lie before the workman in assembling the musket is the barrel. The value of it complete is three dollars. From the barrel we go down by a gradually descending scale to the piece of smallest value, which is a little wire called the ramrod spring wire--the value of which is only one mill; that is the workman is paid only one dollar a thousand for the manufacture of it. The time expended in assembling a musket is about ten minutes, and the price paid for the work is four cents.
The New Arsenal, which has already been alluded to in the description of the general view of the Arsenal grounds, is a very stately edifice. It is two hundred feet long, seventy feet wide, and fifty feet high. It is divided into three stories, each of which is calculated to contain one hundred thousand muskets, making three hundred thousand in all. The muskets when stored in this arsenal are arranged in racks set up for the purpose along the immense halls, where they stand upright in rows, with the glittering bayonets shooting up, as it were, above. The visitors who go into the arsenal walk up and down the aisles which separate the ranges of racks, admiring the symmetry and splendor of the display.
The Arsenal has another charm for visitors besides the beauty of the spectacle which the interior presents--and that is the magnificent panorama of the surrounding country, which is seen from the summit of the tower. This tower, which occupies the centre of the building, is about ninety feet high--and as it is about thirty feet square, the deck at the top furnishes space for a large party of visitors to stand and survey the surrounding country. Nothing can be imagined more enchanting than the view presented from this position in the month of June. The Armory grounds upon one side, and the streets of the town upon the other lie, as it were, at the feet of the spectator, while in the distance the broad and luxuriant valley of the Connecticut is spread out to view, with its villages, its fields, its groves, its bridges, its winding railways, and its serpentine and beautiful streams.