height, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of