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