ILLUSTRATIONS

  Ship in dry-dock:  Harlan & Hollingsworth company.

  Wilmington depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore railroad.

  The Brandywine, and Lea’s mills.

  Iron ship-building and machine-works—­P. 378.

  Christine creek with the diamond state works.

  Plate-iron rolling-mills—­P. 379.

  Morocco-making factory.—­P. 381.

  Coach-building establishment.—­P. 381

  Steam manufactory of SUPERPHOSPHATES.

  FAUKLAND, the site of Oliver Evans’s mill.

  Brandywine springs, on Redclay creek.

  House of Mr. J.T.  Heald.

  Depot of the Wilmington and western railroad.

  Christine river, with Wilmington and western railroad bridge.

  Cutting through Cuba hill Ridge.

  View of the Wilmington wharves.

  From Constantina to Setif.

  Mountain Arabs.

  An Arab douar.

  The washerwomen.

  The stone turban.

  Bou-Kteun.

  Tobriz, an enemy of the guillotine.

  The iron gates.

WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.

[Illustration:  Ship in dry-dock:  Harlan & Hollingsworth company.]

Sleepy travelers on the great route to Washington, having passed Philadelphia and expecting Baltimore, are attracted, if it is a way-train, by a phenomenon.  The engine is observed to slacken, and a little elderly man with a lantern, looking in the twilight like an Arabian Night’s phantom with one red eye in the middle of its body, places himself just in advance of the locomotive.  He trots nimbly along, defending himself from incessant death by the sureness of his legs, and after a long race guides up to the station the clattering train, which is all the time threatening to catch him by the heel.  “Wilmington!” shouts the brakesman.  Every train into Wilmington is thus attended, as the palfrey of an Eastern pasha by the running footman.  The man’s life is passed in a perpetual race with destruction, and having beaten innumerable locomotives, he still survives, contentedly wagging his crimson eye, and hardly conscious that his existence is a perpetual escape.

[Illustration:  Wilmington depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore railroad.]

Something quaint, peremptory, old-world and feudal strikes the traveler as adhering in this custom, by which Wilmington constantly pays for the general safety of her promenaders with the offering of a citizen’s life and limbs.  This impression is right.  The city is the best-defined spot on the American map where the South begins and the North ends.  Wilmington is, for its own part, a perfect crystal