ould not tell
the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of
ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance
spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the
rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did
something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called
kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all
the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek
to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again.
If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and
inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer
itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way
from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to
examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up
from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.

VII.

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
my head had no ro