Page:The world's show, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to "enjoy themselves", and to see the Great Exhibition (IA worldsshow1851or00mayh).pdf/63

 with a hundred windows, while white wreaths of steam puff fitfully through their walls. Many a narrow thoroughfare is dark and sunless with the tall warehouses that rise up like bricken cliffs on either side. The streets swarm with carts and railway-vans, with drivers perched high in the air, and "lurrys"—some piled with fat round bags of wool, others laden with hard square stony-looking blocks of cotton, and others filled with many a folded piece of unbleached woven cloth. Green covered vans, like huge chests on wheels, rattle past,—the bright zinc plates at their sides, telling that they are hurrying with goods to or from some "calender," "dyer," or "finisher."

At one door stands a truck laden with red rows of copper cylinders, cut deep with patterns. This basement or kitchen is transformed into the showroom of some warehouseman, and as you look down the steps into the subterranean shop, you can see that in front of where the kitchen range should stand, a counter extends, spread with bright-coloured velveteens, while the place of the dresser is taken up with shelves, filled with showy cotton prints. The door-posts of every warehouse are inscribed with long catalogues of names, like those of the Metropolitan Inns of Court; and along the front of the tall buildings, between the different floors, run huge black boards, gilt with the title of some merchant firm.

Along the pavement walk bonnetless women, with shawls drawn over their heads, and their hair and clothes spotted with white fluffs of cotton. In the pathway, and at the corners of the principal streets, stand groups of merchants and manufacturers—all with their hands in their pockets—some buried in their coat-tails—others plunged deep in their breeches, and rattling the money—and each busy trafficking with his neighbour. Beside the kerb-stones loiter bright-coloured omnibuses, the tired horses with their heads hanging low down, and their trembling knees bulging forward—and with the drab-coated and big-buttoned driver loitering by their side, and ready to convey the merchants to their suburban homes.

Go which way you will, the whistle of some arriving or departing railway-train shrieks shrilly in the ears; and at the first break of morning, a thousand factory bells ring out the daily summons to work—and then, as the shades of night fall upon the town, the many windows of the huge mills and warehouses shine like plates of burnished gold with the myriads of lights within. The streets, streaming with children going to or coming from their toil, are black with the moving columns of busy little things, like the paths to an ants' nest.

Within the factories, the clatter and whirr of incalculable wheels stuns and bewilders the mind. Here, in long low rooms, are vistas of carding-engines, some disgorging thick sheets of white, soft-looking wadding, and others pouring forth endless fluffy ropes of cotton into tall tin cylinders; while over-head are wheels, with their rims worn bright, and broad black straps descending from them on every side, with their buckles running rapidly round, and making the stranger shrink as he passes between them. On the floors above are mules after mules, with