e streams made good mill-sites, the
deep waterfront along the river offered splendid wharfage and chances
for shipbuilding, and, as good luck would have it, a rivalry awoke
which ended in loading Media with the county buildings and relieving
Chester. Since then it has doubled and trebled: mills and factories
are on all sides, and its shipyards are not easily surpassed. Roach's
shipyard covers twenty-three acres. The firm make their own engines
and everything required in iron shipbuilding from keel to topmast.
They have six vessels now on the stocks, and employ eleven hundred
men, and have room for sixteen hundred. They have built for every
trade from the coaster to the East Indiaman, varying in size from six
hundred to four thousand tons, and their vessels pass unchallenged
amongst the best in the world.

[Illustration: VIEW OF CHESTER.]

Nor is trade the only feature of the town. About half a mile from the
depot, on a gentle eminence, is the Crozer Theological Seminary. The
approach from Chester for the pedestrian, along the shrub-, vine- and
tree-clad banks of Chester Creek into and across the wide lawn, is a
delightful walk. The principal building was erected by John P. Crozer
for a normal school. During the war he gave it to the government for a
hospital, and when he died in 1866 left it to his sons, desiring
them to devote it to some benevolent use. They have responded in a
munificent manner by establishing a school for training young men for
the ministry, with accommodations for a hundred students, houses for
the professors, a church, a library building, lecture-halls and all
the required conveniences for a great and successful school. They
have added an endowment fund of two hundred and twenty-eight thousand
dollars, the whole gift being about three hundred and ninety thousand
dollars, and one of the family has since given twenty-five thousand
dollars as a library fund. The seminary was opened in 1868 with
fifteen students: there are now fifty from all parts of the Union.

[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF MR. F.O.C. DARLEY.]

But the most complaisant conductor of the most accommodating special
train could not wait any longer for us, and we must hurry on through
Lamokin, where the Baltimore Central, a tributary road, turns off
and traverses a most picturesque country, round by Port Deposit to
Perryville, where it again reaches the main road. At Lamokin are
works where steel of a peculiar kind is manufactured under