admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed
thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances
beating Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the
most adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination from
the warm bath of iron and carbon. Bessemer, with his steel-mines, as
his furnaces at the ore-bank may be termed, was then in the future.
The steel rails over which we now do most of our traveling were
undreamed of. Bar iron did duty on all the eighty-eight hundred miles
of American and sixty-five hundred of British railway; not many, if
at all, more than are now laid, in this country at least, with steel.
This poetic and historic metal has become as truly a raw product as
potatoes. The poets will have to drop it. The glory of Toledo--of
her swords bent double in the scabbard, of her rapiers that bore into
one's interior only the titillating sensation of a spoonful of vanilla
ice, and of her decapitating sabres that left the culprit whole so
long as he forbore to sneeze--is trodden under foot of men.

[Illustration: DUBLIN EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]

In crude materials the Union is at home. It was so in 1851, and is
still; but then it was not so much at home in anything else as now.
We have advanced in that field too, since we sent no silver, and from
Colorado no gold, no canned fruits, meats or fish, and no wine but
some Cincinnati Catawba, thin and acid, according to the verdict
of the imbibing jury. We adventured timidly into manufacturing
competition with the McCormick reaper, which all Europe proceeded
straightway to pirate; ten or twelve samples of cotton and three of
woolen goods; Ericsson's caloric-engine; a hydrostatic pump; some
nautical instruments; Cornelius's chandeliers for burning lard
oil--now the light of other days, thanks to our new riches in