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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

APRIL, 1873.

Vol. XI, No. 25.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES. [Illustrated]

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

SECOND PAPER. [Illustrated]

A CHINESE STORY, by C.P. CRANCH.

BERRYTOWN, by REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

THE GLACIERS OF PARADISE, by HJALMAR HJARTH BOYESEN.

THACKERAY'S "GRAY FRIARS," by AN OLD "GOWN-BOY."

A PRINCESS OF THULE, by WILLIAM BLACK.

CHAPTER IV. ROMANCE-TIME.

CHAPTER V. SHEILA SINGS.

MEDICAL EXPERT EVIDENCE, by H.C. WOOD, JR., M.D.

THE SWEET WATERS, by EDWIN DE LEON.

MADEMOISELLE STYLITES, by MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.

THE MYSTERY OF MASSABIELLE, by WILLIAM D. WOOD.

BENEDICTION, by HOWARD GLYNDON.

A NIGHT IN BEDFORD, VIRGINIA, by RICHARD B. ELDER.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE WELLESLEY-POLES.

THE FATE OF DANGAN CASTLE.

INTERVIEWING CAPTAIN KIDD.

A DINNER EXCUSE.

NOTES.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

_BOOKS RECEIVED._

ILLUSTRATIONS

SHIP IN DRY-DOCK: HARLAN & HOLLINGSWORTH COMPANY.

WILMINGTON DEPOT OF THE PHILADELPHIA, WILMINGTON AND BALTIMORE RAILROAD.

THE BRANDYWINE, AND LEA'S MILLS.

IRON SHIP-BUILDING AND MACHINE-WORKS--P. 378.

CHRISTINE CREEK WITH THE DIAMOND STATE WORKS.

PLATE-IRON ROLLING-MILLS--P. 379.

MOROCCO-MAKING FACTORY.--P. 381.

COACH-BUILDING ESTABLISHMENT.--P. 381

STEAM MANUFACTORY OF SUPERPHOSPHATES.

FAUKLAND, THE SITE OF OLIVER EVANS'S MILL.

BRANDYWINE SPRINGS, ON REDCLAY CREEK.

HOUSE OF MR. J.T. HEALD.

DEPOT OF THE WILMINGTON AND WESTERN RAILROAD.

CHRISTINE RIVER, WITH WILMINGTON AND WESTERN RAILROAD BRIDGE.

CUTTING THROUGH CUBA HILL RIDGE.

VIEW OF THE WILMINGTON WHARVES.

FROM CONSTANTINA TO SETIF.

MOUNTAIN ARABS.

AN ARAB DOUAR.

THE WASHERWOMEN.

THE STONE TURBAN.

BOU-KTEUN.

TOBRIZ, AN ENEMY OF THE GUILLOTINE.

THE IRON GATES.

WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.

[Illustration: SHIP IN DRY-DOCK: HARLAN & HOLLINGSWORTH COMPANY.]

Sleepy travelers on the great route to Washington, having passed
Philadelphia and expecting Baltimore, are attracted, if it is a
way-train, by a phenomenon. The engine is observed to slacken, and
a little elderly man with a lantern, looking in the twilight like an
Arabian Night's phantom with one red eye in the middle of its body,
places himself just in advance of the locomotive. He trots nimbly
along, defending himself from incessant death by the sureness of his
legs, and after a long race guides up to the station the clattering
train, which is all the time threatening to catch him by the heel.
"Wilmington!" shouts the brakesman. Every train into Wilmington is
thus attended, as the palfrey of an Eastern pasha by the running
footman. The man's life is passed in a perpetual race with
destruction, and having beaten innumerable locomotives, he still
survives, contentedly wagging his crimson eye, and hardly conscious
that his existence is a perpetual escape.

[Illustration: WILMINGTON DEPOT OF THE PHILADELPHIA, WILMINGTON AND
BALTIMORE RAILROAD.]

Something quaint, peremptory, old-world and feudal strikes the
traveler as adhering in this custom, by which Wilmington constantly
pays for the general safety of her promenaders with the offering of
a citizen's life and limbs. This impression is right. The city is
the best-defined spot on the American map where the South begins and
the North ends. Wilmington is, for its own part, a perfect crystal
of Yankee grit, run out and fixed in a country which in the highest
degree represents the soft, contented, lazy, incoherent Bourbon
temper. We select it for our subject because it is so complete a
terminal image. There is no other instance in the country of such
sharp, close contrast. A man might step out to the city limit, and
stand with one leg in full Yankeeland, thrilling with enterprise and
emulation, and the other planted, as it were, in the "Patriarchal
Times." Elsewhere along the effaced line of Mason and Dixon the
sections die away into each other: here they stand face to face, and
stare.

[Illustration: THE BRANDYWINE, AND LEA'S MILLS.]

Wilmington's legend belongs to the general story of the settlements
along the Delaware. The discoveries of its site overlapped each other,
the Quakers discovering the Swedes, who had discovered the Dutch, who
had discovered the Indians. It was first called Willing's Town, from
a settler, and then Wilmington, from the earl of that name in England,
to whom Thomson dedicated his poem of _Winter_. But the spirit of
enterprise--the spirit whose results we are now to chronicle--came in
only with William Shipley, for whose story we must refer the reader,
strange as it may seem, to the latest novel of the first living master
of English fiction.

This introduces to our notice the most singular literary partnership
that ever was or ever will be. Dumas used to be helped out in his
splendid fictions by Maquet, but Dumas and Maquet were Frenchmen, and
had plenty of sympathies in common. Charles Reade, however, in his
romance of _The Wandering Heir_, written to minister to the Tichborne
excitement, takes for his helper the most unlikely colleague in
nature--a grave, tranquil, intensely respectable Friend, a writer of
colonial histories in a far pastoral retreat by the Delaware. Such
workmen were never matched before; yet the words of Benjamin Ferris,
the Wilmington antiquarian, form a part, and a telling part, of
the exciting romance signed by Charles Reade. The words of Ferris,
unexpectedly earning renown in a work of imagination, trace the true
tale of the Quaker prophetess, Elizabeth Shipley, who brought her
practical husband to Wilmington through the influence of a brilliant
dream. The words of Ferris, adopted and sold to the publishers by
Reade, describe the terrestrial Paradise now known as Wilmington in
just those glowing and golden terms we should have needed for the
prologue to this article if we had not been so anticipated. Reade,
so long as he keeps up his partnership with Ferris, is safe, sane
and true. It would have been well if he had kept it up a little
longer, for the moment he lets go Ferris's coat-cuff he falls into
mistakes--calling the Delaware hereabouts a "bay," and speaking of a
prickly-pear hedge on a farm only sixty miles from Philadelphia.

[Illustration: IRON SHIP-BUILDING AND MACHINE-WORKS--P. 378.]

The Reade Ferris legend, precluding any necessity of a story from us,
brings good Elizabeth Shipley into Wilmington, which was then a garden
and is now a mart, from her former home at Ridley, which was then
a forest-clearing and is now a garden, being in truth the site of
Ridley Park, the landscape-city which was described in this Magazine
last September. The legend gives all proper emphasis to the location,
endowing it with beauty enough to tempt a celestial guide from heaven
for the meek Quakeress's benefit, and with practical advantages enough
to tempt the worldly-minded husband. To get a high idea of the natural
attractions of Wilmington, therefore, read _The Wandering Heir_, thus
advertised gratuitously. Wilmington lies, says the author of _Peg
Woffington_, "between the finger and thumb of two rivers," and also
upon the broad palm of the Delaware. The two minor streams which
embrace it are entirely different in character: one is a picturesque
torrent, named by the Dutch Brand-wijn (Brandywine), from the
circumstance of a ship loaded with brandy having foundered at its
mouth; the other, serene and navigable, is the Christine, named by the
Swedes from Christina, their favorite princess. Hereabouts George Fox,
the first Quaker, built a fire in 1672 to dry his immortal leather
breeches. "We came to Christian River," he says, "where we swam over
our horses." The stream in that day, before the destruction of inland
forests, had about six times its present volume, but it is still good
for vessels of considerable burden. The thriving settlers made it
carry down the harvests of the interior, and then made the Brandywine
grind them. The focus of the rivers became a rich milling centre, and
was also a post for whaling-ships. The Otaheitan prince stepped from
the deck of the whaler to court with gifts of shells the demure Quaker
maidens of Wilmington, and Kanaka sailors were almost as familiar on
its wharves as Indian chiefs. About the time of the Revolution the
town became a well-known station for the export of quercitron bark,
and all the while the clacking mills were busy along the uneasy rapids
of the Brandywine.

[Illustration: CHRISTINE CREEK WITH THE DIAMOND STATE WORKS.]

[Illustration: PLATE-IRON ROLLING-MILLS--P. 379.]

Shall we take a glance at a historic mill? The best location for
such a structure where water-power just met tide-water, and shallops
drawing eight feet could load up at the shore, was selected in 1762
for mill-buildings which still stand, and which were for many years
the most famous in the country, regulating the price of grain for
the United States. The business soon overflowed, and necessitated the
building, in 1770, of the structures represented in the engraving on
page 371, the whole group, on the two sides of the stream, being under
one ownership, and known as "Lea's Brandywine Mills." Hither would
come the long lines of Conestoga wagons, from distant counties, such
as Dauphin and Berks, with fat horses, and wagoners persuading them
by means of biblical oaths jabbered in Pennsylvania Dutch. From these
mills Washington removed the runners (or upper stones), lest they
should be seized and used by the British, hauling them up into Chester
county. When independence was secured the State of Delaware hastened
to pass laws putting foreign trade on a more liberal footing than
the neighbor commonwealths, thus securing for her mills the enviable
commerce with the West Indies. Much shipping was thus attracted to
Wilmington, and the trade with Cuba in corn-meal was particularly
large. It was found, however, that the flour of maize invariably
rotted in a tropical voyage, and thereupon the commodity known as
kiln-dried corn was invented at the Brandywine Mills: two hundred
bushels would be dried per day on brick floors, and be thought a large
amount, though the "pan-kiln" now in use dries two thousand in the
same time. The dried meal was delivered at Havana perfectly fresh, and
pay received, in those good old days of barter, in Jamaica rum, sugar
and coffees. In the old times flour was heaped in the barrels and
patted down with wooden shovels: then, when full, a cloth was laid
over the top, and the fattest journeyman on the premises clambered up
to a seat on the heap, to "cheese it down" and imprint his callipyge
upon it. Flour thus made and branded was always safe to bring a high
price, but never so high as in the short epoch of the Continental
currency, when the old entries of the Brandywine Mill books show
(1780) wheat bought at twenty-four pounds a bushel, a pair of the
miller's leather small-clothes at eighty pounds, and some three or
four hundred barrels of his flour charged at a gross sum of twenty-one
thousand pounds.

The fine old mills are still in lively operation, manufacturing into
meal about a million bushels of wheat and Indian corn every year. The
principal proprietor receives us in his domain, the living image of
easy, old-fashioned prosperity, and narrates the long history of the
structures, showing his little museum of curiosities--now a whale's
jaw bequeathed from the old fishing days, now a Revolutionary
cannon-ball--and helps us to realize the ancient times by means of the
music of the mill, which is loquacious now as it was under George III.

Such is a specimen of one of the stout old industries of a hundred
years ago, still surviving and hale as ever, though out of its former
proportion amongst the immense enterprises of modern days. This
article, however, must pass out of the atmosphere of ancient tradition
as quickly as possible, being intended to show the handsome city of
Wilmington with its sleeves rolled up as it were, and in the thick of
the hardest work belonging to the nineteenth century. When steam was
introduced to revolutionize labor, and railroads came to supplement
water-transport, they found the manufacturers of this prosperous town
ready to avail themselves of every improvement, and pass at once from
the chrysalis state into the soaring development of modern enterprise.

That is a feature the citizens point out with a good deal of honest
pride--the prosperity of the old families, enabling them at once to
invest in the most enormous of modern mechanical applications. The
wealthy companies now found here did not go to work by calling for
capital from the large cities: they went to the old stocking, and
found it there. The manufacturers show you, reared in a back office or
sticking on a wall, the ancient family sign, which Washington and La
Fayette regarded at the time of their disasters along the Brandywine.
It is one continuity of thrift.

Take, for instance, some of these Lairds of America, who build ships
along the Delaware as their prototypes upon the Clyde. The Harlan
& Hollingsworth Company claims to be the oldest iron shipbuilding
establishment in America. The money in this concern was local. The
partners were old neighbors, relatives or friends. They worked along
as a firm until 1868, when the huge proportions of their business
induced them to incorporate themselves as a company, still
distinguished by the good old proper names. We stroll into their
domain by the river-side, and if we previously cherished any notion
that shipbuilding was a decayed institution in America, the lively
tumult here will effectually drive the insulting thought out of our
heads. Among a shoal of leviathans stretched out beside the waters
there is the iron steamer Acapulco, waiting for her compound engines
from John Elder & Co. of Glasgow: she is three hundred feet long (and
that is a dimension that looks almost immeasurable when dry on land),
forty feet beam and twenty-five hundred tons burden. Another, of
similar dimensions, is building beside her, and they are both intended
for the Pacific Mail Company's line, and will ply between California
and China. The various operations going on upon the ground--the laying
of an iron keel three hundred feet long, the modeling into true and
fine curves the enormous plates for a ship's side, the joining of
these so neatly that the rivets are not visible, and the bending of
stout iron timbers on vast iron floors--are interesting even as a
mere spectacle; and the trains of men who go about to minister to the
various great machines seem like races of beings suddenly diminished
in the scale of magnitude, and to be so many wise Lilliputians
attending around the bodies of creatures of Brobdingnag. It is true
that neat mechanical contrivances save their muscle wherever it is
possible. A great plate of iron or a bundle of deck flooring is picked
up, by a hand which swings down from aloft, like a visiting-card by
a lady: a single man turning a windlass, it sails into the air, gets
up as high as it chooses to, and drops delicately just where it is
wanted along the length of the structure. Out on the wharf a double
"hoister," working by steam, and able to pick up and swing a hundred
tons, is used in handling the materials of the works. The dry-docks
are, in winter, a singular spectacle. They are a vast hospital
of interesting invalids, the patients being steamers, barges and
canal-boats. For instance, the old Edwin Forrest, which has paddled up
the Delaware with excursionists since a time whereof the mind of man
runneth not to the contrary, comes up into the dry-dock complaining of
its bunions. The dry-dock accommodates a ship as long as three hundred
and forty feet, and is one hundred feet across. The gouty steamer
potters comfortably in, and lays up its tired keel, while the dock is
being discharged, as serenely as a patient who lays his foot on the
knee of a corn-doctor: in due time, relieved and sound, the invalid
is ready to take the stage of life again. Another boat comes in to
be lengthened: it has growing-pains, and wants assistance. The stern
is sliced off, the keel is spliced, and the adolescent leaves the
docks longer by twenty feet. On the steamers that are being finished
we notice the extreme beauty of the upholstery and of the engraved,
inlaid and polished woodwork: it is all done on the spot, and before
we leave Wilmington we shall have many occasions to admire the luxury
with which the higher kinds of joinery are prepared for the various
structures made there. On our way to the car-works--for this versatile
corporation is a great manufacturer of railway-carriages too--we
notice the throngs of workers scattered like ants over every part of
the huge area, and it occurs to us to ask if there are any strikes.
Our conductor is Mr. J. Taylor Gause, a big, hearty, shrewd man, who
knows every bolt and rivet on the whole premises as Bunyan knew the
words of his Bible.

[Illustration: MOROCCO-MAKING FACTORY.--P. 381.]

"We never have any trouble," replies Mr. Gause; "and it is owing to a
way we have of nipping sea-lawyers in the bud."

And what, may we ask, are sea-lawyers?

"Sea-lawyer is a workman's term. The sea-lawyer is the calculating,
dissatisfied, eloquent man. He is the Henri Rochefort of their
assemblies. A supposed grievance arises, the men have a meeting, and
the sea-lawyer begins to stir them up, big in his opportunity. We
find who he is, pay him on the instant, and send him away. The men
run about for a while with their complaints in their heads, but with
nobody to utter them by. It ends by their coming to us in a body
to receive back the mischief-maker, by this time repentant. This we
generally do, getting a friend converted from an enemy."

[Illustration: COACH-BUILDING ESTABLISHMENT.--P. 381]

In fact, the workmen of this city do not strike. The principal remedy
for the disease is a simple one. They are householders, being aided to
own their own houses. They are therefore committed to the interests of
the place, and do not deal in revolutions which would make wandering
Ishmaelites of them.

The Harlan & Hollingsworth Company makes great numbers of
railway-cars, from the ordinary kind to the most luxurious
saloon-cars, and the examination of the shops is entertaining
enough. Pullman, in fact, is said to have had more of his luxurious
parlor-cars built in Wilmington than in any other city. As we are
going, however, to see these carriages constructed where their
manufacture is a specialty, we will not linger here, where they occupy
but a part of an enormous establishment.

We will visit some more of the American Lairds. Pusey, Jones & Co.
show you the vast extent of their premises, occupying ten acres
and extending along the water in a thousand feet of wharfage. Their
iron ships--one of which the artist has caught just after its
completion--and other boats are moving to-day on nearly every river
emptying into our Atlantic coast or the Gulf of Mexico. Steamboats of
their build are now troubling the more distant waters of the Atrato,
Magdalena, Orinoco, Amazon, Purus, Madeira, Tocantins, Ucayali, La
Plata, Parana and Guayaquil Rivers of South America. They have other
branches of manufacture, uniting the industries of the land to the
toil of the sea. They turn out great quantities of machinery and many
engines for paper-mills and iron-rolling mills, either of which they
supply in every detail. This is an old and experienced firm, fully
settled in character, credit and reputation.

Another great industrial combination is the Diamond State Works,
established in 1853, occupying a whole block, and enjoying a frontage
of three hundred and fifty feet on the Christine. Here are made the
vast variety of things into which iron can be rolled or pinched.
The eye is puzzled and pleased at the groups of intelligent machines
standing up in their places and moulding with their steel fingers the
rivets and the bolts; the railroad spikes, washers and fish-joints;
the nuts, whether hot-pressed or cold-pressed; the lag-screws and
the bolt-ends. Bars of all sizes and for an endless number of
uses are pressed out like dough, and stored for sale in enormous
warehouses. Mr. Mendinhall and Mr. Clement B. Smyth, the president
and vice-president of this company, are of long experience in the
management of their business; and the business of the company
increases from year to year, demanding all the room in its commodious
location, and necessitating an office in New York, where, at No.
71 Broadway, the large disbursing interests of the works are partly
attended to.

Such are the bare commercial facts. But stand in one of these noisy
working-grounds of a manufacturing place like Wilmington, or ride up
to the top of one of their buildings on the steam-elevators which some
of them employ. Think how these men of iron are changing the surface
of the earth, spiking rails to the prairie in distant territories,
or sending into Polynesian archipelagoes the rivet on whose integrity
depends the safety of the iron ship. How needful to human progress
is the conscientious perfection of their work! What tact they must
employ in dealing with phalanxes of laborers of different nations
and imperfect intelligence! What a stimulus to genius they are,
with their readiness to catch at any labor-saving machine! See that
astute-looking dwarf of an apparatus, biting off red-hot ends of
rods, closing its jaws together upon them in such a way as to form
a four-square mould, then smartly hitting one end so as to make a
projecting head: a railroad spike is turned off in a moment. See this
other making "nuts" as smartly as a baker makes ginger-nuts: some are
raw and some are cooked--that is, some are punched hot and some cold,
sufficing for different purposes: the cold are the softer, and the
easier to "tap" or perforate with the screw--thread. Other machines
are scissors trimming plates of iron like cardboard; others, in a
careless kind of way, spend all their time in nipping off whatever
bolts and bars are presented to them; and others make pretty rows of
rivet-holes all along the edges of huge iron plates. These animated
creatures of the mill, performing their tasks like child's play,
are efforts of intellectual genius as truly as are the dramas of
Shakespeare. And busy talents are growing up in our manufacturing
centres as in hotbeds, each one trying to carry the domain of
mechanical substitution a little farther, and so escape the necessity,
so costly in America, of paying for man-power. In several ways a grand
manufactory is a college, stimulating the human minds engaged there
in the highest degree, setting a premium on intellect and culture, and
reminding us that whoever caused some idea to take shape that never
had an existence before, was called by the ancients a "_poeta_."

[Illustration: STEAM MANUFACTORY OF SUPERPHOSPHATES.]

We will explore another of these great working-places--this time,
a group of mills as large as a modest village, yet devoted to one
special product. In 1864, Mr. Henry B. Seidel purchased a rolling-mill
which had already been in operation with varied success for eighty
years, and established the manufacture of large plates for iron
ships and boilers. In a few years, associating with himself his
superintendent, Mr. Hastings, he greatly enlarged his operations, and
the firm found their edifice too small. An ample new one, one hundred
and twenty-five feet long, was put up in 1870, upon the Church street
side of their property, and with the introduction of all the new
machines became capable of the quickest and completest operations.
Seidel & Hastings now run both mills, and turn out, when working night
and day, at the rate of between five and six thousand tons of plate
iron per annum. They prepare their own "blooms" of charcoal iron at a
great forge erected on their premises: this forge has five fires, and
is provided with the engines and blowing-cylinders for the manufacture
of boiler iron, and the monster steam-hammers necessary in its
preparation. Nature's products are here taught manners with a witness:
whatever shape they enter in, they leave in the form of pie-crust. The
tough old genius of iron, which has been trying since the creation to
build itself into mountains or dissipate itself in bogs, is taught by
the powerful persuasions of these gentlemen to pack and toughen itself
into cards, and is only recognized by the foreman when he takes count
of stock as "plate inch and a half" or "plate one-eighth."

[Illustration: FAUKLAND, THE SITE OF OLIVER EVANS'S MILL.]

But the reader has had enough of iron. We will relieve him--though
we cannot promise not to revert to the metals--with a glimpse of some
different kinds of employment. Nothing, now, can be softer than kid,
nothing more scholarly than a morocco book-binding, nothing is more
brilliant in the autumn woods than sumach, nothing is more graceful
than the pet goat of Esmeralda. We will pay a visit to one of the
morocco-factories, premising that our independent little city of
Wilmington has a wide reputation in the trade for her excellence in
this special article, and that her product in morocco is actually
the largest single item of her trade, the production last year having
exceeded two million dollars' worth. We will enter a specimen factory,
where the tame African goats playing about the yard, by putting their
skins into contact with the powdered sumach lying up stairs in the
bags, are to yield us specimens of about the best American morocco
known to commerce. The superiority of the Wilmington product is
attributed by buyers to something in the quality of the Brandywine
water, but probably the high condition and tone of the workmen has
more to do with it. In Wilmington, where a workman finds that a given
rate of wages represents better living and more happiness than in any
large city, the labor obtainable for the pay is naturally of a higher
character; and this, in a business where everything depends upon hand
manipulation, is a controlling influence. The factory we select is
that of Pusey, Scott & Co., at Madison and Third streets, five stories
high and a hundred and sixty feet deep. Over this scented labyrinth we
go, up stairs and down; now among the slippery vats, where the hides
are deprived of their hair; now into a bright room, where half a dozen
pretty sewing-machine girls are stitching the wet, slimy skins into
bags; now into gloomy cellars, where these bags are filled with
sumach-dust and water. The scene in these dark apartments, where many
of the workmen are negroes, is especially high-flavored and like a
chapter in _Vathek_. Writers usually talk of "life in the iron-mills"
as conducing to the development of herculean strength. But
iron-workers are apt to be dry and wiry, their flesh half sweated off
and their complexions unnaturally pale. For true muscular development,
rather Flemish and beefy in quality, we would instance the workmen
in this department of a morocco-factory. The skins when filled with
water are very heavy, and the jolly fellows who play at aquatic games
with them, now ducking into the tanks, now holding a bag under the
hopper whence the sumach descends, and anon stirring, manipulating
and inspecting the mass of floating pillows, are true heroes out of
Rubens' pictures. The scenes up stairs again, where young Swedes
and Irish boys dress the dry skins, painting them over with black,
and polishing and graining them by rubbing them with stones (a
back-breaking operation, apparently, in the attitude of laundresses
bent over an eternal washboard), are all highly entertaining. In
the store-rooms we see the handsome sheets of morocco, including the
kangaroo skins from Australia, perforated here and there with the
hunter's shot, and distinguishable by the enormous flap which has,
in the creature's life, encased the tail. Among them all the little
orphaned kid skins, clothed in mourning colors and so soft and small,
look very innocent and interesting. The distinguishing claim of
Wilmington is that of having been the pioneer to introduce machinery
into this as into other kinds of business. Several kinds of
labor-saving apparatus are explained to us, and the foresight in
building the apartments so that the skins travel from stage to stage
with the least possible lifting is pointed out. These economies are
said to be unmatched in the world. In this manufacture the relations
of employers with employed, and amongst each other, would appear
to be particularly happy. The morocco-makers of Wilmington seem to
believe that worth makes the man, that readiness to do a favor to
fellow-manufacturers is what shows the true "grain," and that "the
rest is naught but leather and prunello." In dealing with their men,
Messrs. Pusey, Scott & Co. have kept up the best relations, and have
solved the difficult, the crucial problem in these latitudes, of
inducing whites and negroes to labor side by side at the same task
in harmony. We believe that this one fact alone, if we were able to
develop it eloquently, would be found to stamp the character of the
principals with the best traits of benevolence, tact and sense. Mr.
Warner, our guide through the premises, concludes the exhibition
by showing us a curious set of great books in the counting house,
where the foreman of each department records his answer daily to a
list of printed questions, stating his figures, his ideas, reports,
suggestions and complaints. This diurnal inquisition, which
morally gives ventilation to the whole establishment, and relieves
difficulties at their start, seems to be another indication of an
enviable relationship, keeping up an excellent, old-fashioned sympathy
between employers and operatives.

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