I lodged at a little village inn between Wakefield and Leeds, after a day of the most enjoyable walk that I had made.  Never before, between sun and sun, had I passed over such a section of above-ground and under-ground industry and wealth.  The next morning I continued northward, and noticed still more striking combinations of natural productions and human industries than on the preceding day.  One small, rural area in which these were blended impressed me greatly, and I stopped to photograph the scene on my mind.  In a circle hardly a third of a mile in diameter, there was the heaviest crop of oats growing that I had yet seen in England; in another part of the same field there was a large brick-kiln; in another, an extensive quarry and machinery for sawing the stone into all sizes and shapes; then a furnace for casting iron, and lastly, a coal mine; and all these departments of labor and production were in full operation.  It is quite possible that not one of the hundred laborers on and under this ten-acre patch ever thought it an extraordinary focus of production.  Perhaps even the proprietors and managers of the five different enterprises worked on the small space had taken its rich and diversified fertilities as a matter of course, as we take the rain, light and heat of summer; but to a traveller “taking stock” of a country’s resources, it could not but be a point of view exciting admiration.  I left it behind me deeply impressed with the conviction that I had seen the most productive ten-acre field that could be found on the surface of the globe, counting in the variety and value of its surface and sub-surface crops.

I took tea with a friend in Leeds, remaining only an hour or two in that town, then pursuing my course northward.  The wide world knows so much of Leeds that any notice that I could give of it might seem affected and presumptuous.  It is to the Cloth-World what Rome is to the Catholic.  Its Cloth Hall is the St. Peter’s of Coat-and-trouserdom.  Its rivers, streams and canals run black and blue with the stringent juices of all the woods and weeds of the world used in dyeing.  The woods of all the continents come floating in here, like baled summer clouds of heaven.  It is a city of magnipotent chimneys; and they stand thick and tall on the hills and in the valleys around, and puff their black breathings into the face and eyes of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving it no time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean, except a few hours on the sabbath.  The Leeds Mercury is a power in the land, and everybody who reads the English language in either hemisphere knows Edward Baines by name.