energy of its manufacturers, but gives every
promise of shortly eclipsing Leeds in general
business.

There can scarcely be a more picturesque
journey than that through the manufacturing
districts of Yorkshire. Approach Bradford
which way you please, you cannot but be
forcibly struck with the beauty of the country
around. Bold hills, gently undulating meadowland,
highly cultivated fields, canals, railroads,
a most charming little river, and all dotted
about with copse and dell, and inoculated
with pretty villas, and lightly sprinkled over
with busy towns—Yorkshire looks like a
somewhat uneven grass-plot stuck about with
bee-hives. It is true the hives are rather
smoky hives; but then the green hills, and
the greener fields, and the fine bracing air,
make one forget the colour of the smoke.
You need not inquire when you are beyond
Lancashire and into the confines of the
West Riding: you can detect the locality
by your nose. There is nothing but wool,
and oil, and water, being knocked about, and
mixed up, and torn asunder, and broken on
savage, unrelenting wheels, and drawn out
into "slivers," and scalded in hot soap-suds
all day long, and all the year long. It may
rain, hail, thunder, or anything else it pleases,
but it's all the same to the Yorkshire folk:
there's no peace for the wool. The whole
county smells fusty, frowsy, and moist: the
length and breadth of the West Riding must
be full of damp great-coats and wretchedly
wet trousers, or I am much mistaken.

Now and then you get a mile or so of fresh
sweet air as you are whisked along in the
train; but only as a short relief from tall,
dark, mysterious-looking buildings, like
county jails or model prisons, with a curling
black stream of smoke above, and another
gurgling black stream of water below, which
would induce one to believe the place to be a
blacking manufactory, and that they were
then busy washing out the old bottles. You
whistle past it, and smell more great-coats
and trousers, and then you come to some more
green fields, rattle over a canal, wind round a
hill, plunge under the high road, whisk round
a corner, and there you are—in the very
heart of damp wearing-apparel—in the town
of Bradford.

If the reader should pay a visit to this
interesting manufacturing town, he will
perhaps feel, as I did, rather surprised to see so
many over-grown school-boys lounging about.
Why, some of those old boys in blue and white
pinafores were really grey-headed. They had
none of their books or slates with them, and,
upon the whole, I thought they were taking
it rather easy. When I entered one of the
large stone factories, I found the ground
floor filled with these elderly lads, and began
to fancy I had walked by mistake into some
extensive national school for adult pupils.
However, this puzzle was soon solved. The
men in pinafores were simply the factory-
labourers, long custom having given them
these long habits, which, however useful, are
far from picturesque.

There is not a very wide difference between
the mode of working up cotton, wool, and
Alpaca, although of course there are many
peculiarities in each set of machines adapted
to the characteristics of the various fibrous
materials. They are all beaten and shaken,
and pulled to pieces, and put together again
and made even and straight, and worked into
"slivers," and drawn out fine, and then
'finished," and finally spun into yarn of
varying thicknesses. In one respect, however,
there is a wide distinction between the working
of cotton, and of wool or Alpaca, the
former never being moistened; whereas both
the latter are not only well washed in hot
soap-suds, but actually put through an oil
bath. Some woollen manufacturers use as
much as three or four hundred tons of olive
oil in one year in the preparation of their
yarns and cloths: very few, even of the
smaller men, but use their tens of tons in that
time.

In the spinning of Alpaca, the process, and
the machinery also, bear a close resemblance
to those of the cotton factories. Except in
some few particulars, a description of one
would be an account of the other. The
alpaca manufacture is, however, chiefly of
interest, from the fact of its supplying us
with fabrics which at once supplant cotton,
silk, and woollen goods, for a multitude of
purposes. Not only have ladies dresses and
children frocks of light summer make, but
the same for autumn and winter. Gentlemen
are provided by means of this fabric
with waistcoating as cool as any cotton, yet
rich and lustrous as the best silk patterns.
Dwellers in tropical countries are thankful to
possess a black coat, which, while it represents
a cloth coat, is not a fourth of the
weight, nor a half of the price. Boots, caps,
parasols, bonnets, trousers, cloaks, and I know
not how many other things equally useful,
may now be composed entirely or partly of
this material.

There is, however, one building of Cyclopean
proportions, rearing its Titan head—or, just
at present, not more than its trunk—above
the green fields of the Bradford neighbourhood,
which deserves a passing notice, inasmuch
as there is not only nothing equal to it in
all Yorkshire or Lancashire—and that is
saying something; but, when finished, there
will doubtless be no factory in the world that
shall approach it in magnificence, in extent, or
in completeness of purpose.

This one factory, which is to be the astonishment
of the manufacturing world, is in course
of erection by the same person who, sixteen
years since, caused so much amazement in
the establishment of C. W. and F. Foozle and
Co. about those three hundred and odd dirty
bales of South American stuff. Mr. Titus
Salt, of Bradford, is engaged in constructing