shing up their more forward predecessors, until the last
perfect carriage is ejected from the fifteen-hundredth foot of the
building's length. Each one, gathering material and ornament as it rolls
steadily along in its crablike side-fashion, becomes at last a vehicle
of perfect luxury; and then, with one final plunge into the open air, it
leaves its diversely-destined neighbors, and changes for ever its
sidelong motion for the forward roll which will carry it through a long
existence. A very large proportion of this company's work is on "palace"
cars of the Pullman type, those extravagances of luxury of which Europe
is just now applying to Wilmington to learn the lesson. Narrow-gauge
cars for the West, in supplying which they are the pioneers, gaudy cars
for South America, and sturdy, solid ones for Canada, are all gently
riding forward, side to side, in this inexorable chain of destiny, and
diverging at the front door on their widely-different errands. Besides
the manufacture of cars, the company builds every sort of coasters and
steamers. The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly
high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland
as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the
panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of
palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin
Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing
the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the
tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free
from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon.
Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves
arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine
residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.

The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty,
turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work
goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and
come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The
hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell
Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other,
like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently
whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that
will behave rashly and heat their