Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/69

 through mediocre streets of brick, that seem as if they had been built wholesale by contract within the last half-dozen years. These humble houses are the homes of the operative manufacturers. The old walls of York, built in the reign of Edward the First, still enclose the city;—the antique suit of armor made for it six hundred years ago, though the fit be somewhat of the tightest, buckles round it still. Manchester, on the other hand, has been doubling its population every halfcentury for the last hundred and fifty years; and the cord of cotton twist that would have girdled it at the beginning of the great revolutionary war, would do little more than half-girdle it now. The field of Peterloo, on which the yeomanry slashed down the cotton-workers assembled to hear Henry Hunt,—poor lank-jawed men, who would doubtless have manifested less interest in the nonsense of the orator, had they been less hungry at the time,—has been covered with brick for the last ten years.

As we advance, the town presents a new feature. We see whole streets of warehouses,—dead, dingy, gigantic buildings, barred out from the light; and, save where here and there a huge wagon stands, lading or unlading under the mid-air crane, the thoroughfares, and especially the numerous cul de sacs, have a solitary, half-deserted air. But the city clocks have just struck one,—the dinner hour of the laboring English; and in one brief minute two-thirds of the population of the place have turned out into the streets. The rush of the human tide is tremendous,—headlong and arrowy as that of a Highland river in flood, or as that of a water-spout just broken amid the hills, and at once hurrying adowna hundred different ravines. But the outburst is short as fierce: we have stepped aside into some door-way, or out towards the centre of some public square, to be beyond the wind of such commotion; and