rmounted by an eagle cast from captured cannon.

But the best thing a manufacturing town can do for her workman is to
educate his children. During the old aristocratic days of Wilmington she
was satisfied with the reputation of her private tutors and of her young
ladies' seminaries, where "sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair"
cultivated cheeks like the surrounding peaches, while they learned
Shakespeare, musical glasses and the use of the globes. It was not until
1852 that the Delaware Legislature chartered a board of education for
the town. In these twenty years fifteen schools have been put up, with
five thousand attenders. Schoolhouse No. 1, shown in the illustration,
accommodates four hundred and thirty-six pupils, and furnishes an
education, in the words of the late Bishop Potter, "good enough for the
richest and cheap enough for the poorest."

The choice streets of the city are filling up with tasteful residences.
As a specimen we present the house of Colonel McComb, an old favorite of
Wilmington, where his familiar appellation of "Harry McComb" is as often
uttered day by day as it was at Washington during the exposure by its
owner of Congressional honesty and piety--or magpiety.

A hotel of the first class has been erected, and baptized with the
commemorative name of the Clayton House. It has one hundred and five
chambers and every improvement. A very characteristic fact, showing the
spirit of integrity and goodness which here travels hand in hand with
modern enterprise, is that the owners sacrificed full _three-quarters_
of the rent they could have obtained, in order to keep it pledged as a
temperance house. Another elegant building has been put up by the
Masonic fraternity for their own purposes and those of the Board of
Trade, etc., including a handsome opera-house on the ground floor. The
auditorium is praised for its acoustic properties by Parepa-Rosa,
Wallack, Davenport and other performers, seats about fifteen hundred,
and is furnished with the inevitable drop-curtain by Russell Smith.
Faced with iron painted white, and very rich in mouldings and ornaments,
the building presents as cheery a front to enter as any similar place of
attraction known to the American tourist. The Masonic rooms above, and
those of the Board of Trade, Historical Society, etc., are provided with
every beauty and comfort.

Here are the indications of a prospering, laboring, thinking, virtuous
city of the New World. We have