mine would have censured the "Manchester school" for the weather
of the place, and found in its cold gray light the effect of the
Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction in
gloom.


IV

I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it,
was very cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge
lowries, as the wagons are called, passing through the streets
with the cotton fabrics of the place in certain stages of
manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the finished material. In
Manchester itself one sees not much else of "the cotton-spinning
chorus" which has sent its name so far. The cotton is now spun in
ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood of the
great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills
in our Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them
with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained
there were, for my luckless moment, inoperative. Personal
influences brought me within one or two days of their starting
up; one almost started up during my brief stay; but a great mill,
employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for the sake
of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to
come away without mine.

I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the
great Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired.
Coming or going, I asked about it, and was told, looking for it