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