A dry-goods buyer will sometimes spend a month in New York, the first third or half of which he will devote to ascertaining what goods are in the market, and what are to arrive; also to learning the mood of the English, French, and Germans who hold the largest stocks.  Sometimes these gentlemen will make an early trial of their goods at auction.  Unsatisfactory results will rouse their phlegm or fire, and they declare they will not send another piece of goods to auction, come what may.  For local or temporary reasons, buyers sometimes persist in holding back till the season is so far advanced that the foreign gentlemen become alarmed.  Their credits in London, Paris, and Amsterdam are running out; they are anxious to make remittances; and then ensues one of those dry-goods panics so characteristic of New York and its mixed multitude; an avalanche of goods descends upon the auction-rooms, and prices drop ten, twenty, forty per cent., it may be, and the unlucky or short-sighted men who made early purchases are in desperate haste to run off their stocks before the market is irreparably broken down.  Whether, therefore, to buy early or late, in large or in small quantities, at home or abroad,—­are questions beset with difficulty.  He who imports largely may land his goods in a bare market and reap a golden harvest, or in a market so glutted with goods that the large sums he counts out to pay the duties may be but a fraction of the loss he knows to be inevitable.

In addition to the problems belonging to time and place of purchasing, to quantities and prices, there is a host of other problems begotten of styles, of colors, of assortments, of texture and finish, of adaptation to one market or another.  The profit on a case of goods is often sacrificed by the introduction or omission of one color or figure, the presence or absence of which makes the merchandise desirable or undesirable.  Little less than omniscience will suffice to guard against the sometimes sudden, and often most unaccountable, freaks of fashion, whose fiat may doom a thing, in every respect admirably adapted to its intended use, to irretrievable condemnation and loss of value.  And when you remember that the purchases of dry-goods must be made in very large quantities, from a month to six or even twelve months before the buyer can sell them, and that his sales are many times larger than his capital, and most of them on long credit, you have before you a combination of exigencies hardly to be paralleled elsewhere.

The crisis of 1857 brought a general collapse.  Scores and scores of jobbers failed; very few dared to buy goods.  Mills were compelled to run on short time, or to cease altogether.  The country became bare of the common necessaries of life.  In process of time trade rallied.  Manufacturing recommenced; orders for goods poured in; and for a twelve-month and more the manufacturer has had it all his own way.  His goods are all sold ahead, months ahead of his ability to manufacture.  He makes