We will visit some more of the American Lairds.  Pusey, Jones & Co. show you the vast extent of their premises, occupying ten acres and extending along the water in a thousand feet of wharfage.  Their iron ships—­one of which the artist has caught just after its completion—­and other boats are moving to-day on nearly every river emptying into our Atlantic coast or the Gulf of Mexico.  Steamboats of their build are now troubling the more distant waters of the Atrato, Magdalena, Orinoco, Amazon, Purus, Madeira, Tocantins, Ucayali, La Plata, Parana and Guayaquil Rivers of South America.  They have other branches of manufacture, uniting the industries of the land to the toil of the sea.  They turn out great quantities of machinery and many engines for paper-mills and iron-rolling mills, either of which they supply in every detail.  This is an old and experienced firm, fully settled in character, credit and reputation.

Another great industrial combination is the Diamond State Works, established in 1853, occupying a whole block, and enjoying a frontage of three hundred and fifty feet on the Christine.  Here are made the vast variety of things into which iron can be rolled or pinched.  The eye is puzzled and pleased at the groups of intelligent machines standing up in their places and moulding with their steel fingers the rivets and the bolts; the railroad spikes, washers and fish-joints; the nuts, whether hot-pressed or cold-pressed; the lag-screws and the bolt-ends.  Bars of all sizes and for an endless number of uses are pressed out like dough, and stored for sale in enormous warehouses.  Mr. Mendinhall and Mr. Clement B. Smyth, the president and vice-president of this company, are of long experience in the management of their business; and the business of the company increases from year to year, demanding all the room in its commodious location, and necessitating an office in New York, where, at No. 71 Broadway, the large disbursing interests of the works are partly attended to.

Such are the bare commercial facts.  But stand in one of these noisy working-grounds of a manufacturing place like Wilmington, or ride up to the top of one of their buildings on the steam-elevators which some of them employ.  Think how these men of iron are changing the surface of the earth, spiking rails to the prairie in distant territories, or sending into Polynesian archipelagoes the rivet on whose integrity depends the safety of the iron ship.  How needful to human progress is the conscientious perfection of their work!  What tact they must employ in dealing with phalanxes of laborers of different nations and imperfect intelligence!  What a stimulus to genius they are, with their readiness to catch at any labor-saving machine!  See that astute-looking dwarf of an apparatus, biting off red-hot ends of rods, closing its jaws together upon them in such a way as to form a four-square mould, then smartly hitting one end so as to make a projecting head:  a railroad