ry and wealth. The next morning I
continued northward, and noticed still more striking combinations of
natural productions and human industries than on the preceding day.
One small, rural area in which these were blended impressed me
greatly, and I stopped to photograph the scene on my mind. In a
circle hardly a third of a mile in diameter, there was the heaviest
crop of oats growing that I had yet seen in England; in another part
of the same field there was a large brick-kiln; in another, an
extensive quarry and machinery for sawing the stone into all sizes
and shapes; then a furnace for casting iron, and lastly, a coal
mine; and all these departments of labor and production were in full
operation. It is quite possible that not one of the hundred
laborers on and under this ten-acre patch ever thought it an
extraordinary focus of production. Perhaps even the proprietors and
managers of the five different enterprises worked on the small space
had taken its rich and diversified fertilities as a matter of
course, as we take the rain, light and heat of summer; but to a
traveller "taking stock" of a country's resources, it could not but
be a point of view exciting admiration. I left it behind me deeply
impressed with the conviction that I had seen the most productive
ten-acre field that could be found on the surface of the globe,
counting in the variety and value of its surface and sub-surface
crops.

I took tea with a friend in Leeds, remaining only an hour or two in
that town, then pursuing my course northward. The wide world knows
so much of Leeds that any notice that I could give of it might seem
affected and presumptuous. It is to the Cloth-World what Rome is to
the Catholic. Its Cloth Hall is the St. Peter's of Coat-and-
trouserdom. Its rivers, streams and canals run black and blue with
the stringent juices of all the woods and weeds of the world used in
dyeing. The woods of all the continents come floating in here, like
baled summer clouds of heaven. It is a city of magnipotent
chimneys; and they stand thick and tall on the hills and in the
valleys around, and puff their black breathings into the face and
eyes of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving it no
time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean, except a few hours
on the sabbath. The Leeds Mercury is a power in the land, and
everybody who reads the English language in either hemisphere knows
Edward Baines by name.

As I emerged