good instances, with the large congregations they
accommodate, of the way in which a sane, flourishing manufacturing
community provides for the spiritual needs of its members. The tone and
moral well-being which Boz found, or thought he found, among the
operatives at Lowell are largely realized here. But our picture of
Wilmington as a hive of industry is not yet complete, and before we
enter upon the highly-interesting problem of its dealings with its
working family, we should enter a few more of its sample manufactories.

[Illustration: OFFICE OF THE DAILY COMMERCIAL.]

Take car-building, for an example, in which the reputation of this town
is known to the initiated of all the States and many foreign countries.
Travelers are at this moment spinning in Wilmington-made
railway-carriages over the extremest parts of North and South America,
admiring, through Wilmington-made windows, every possible variety of
winter and tropical scenery, on which they comment in English, German,
French, Spanish and all civilized languages. Such a migratory product as
a rail-car is an active messenger of fame for the place of its
fabrication. We examine, as a fair type, the Jackson and Sharp Company's
works, claimed to be the largest in the New World, and only exceeded by
a few British and Continental establishments. The buildings have
frontage upon the Brandywine and Christine streams, as well as on the
principal railroad. Here are a congeries of two-story buildings, which
are together fifteen hundred feet in length by a width of seventy feet.
Five miles of heating-pipes warm the rooms for a thousand workmen. There
is something logical and consecutive in the arrangement here, which
makes it the best spot on the face of the earth for an enthusiast who
should wish to demonstrate, what all loyal Americans believe in, the
vast superiority of our form of railway-carriage. The cars proceed, in
perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the
progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be
arranged to demonstrate a theory. First the visitor sees lumber in
stock, a million feet of it; then, across one end of a long room, the
mere sketch or transparent diagram of a car; then, a car broadly filled
in; and so on, up to the last glorious result, upholstered with velvet
and smelling of varnish. The cars are on rails, upon which they move,
side on, as if by a principle of growth, the undeveloped ones
perpetually pu