[Illustration:  FAUKLAND, the site of Oliver Evans’s mill.]

But the reader has had enough of iron.  We will relieve him—­though we cannot promise not to revert to the metals—­with a glimpse of some different kinds of employment.  Nothing, now, can be softer than kid, nothing more scholarly than a morocco book-binding, nothing is more brilliant in the autumn woods than sumach, nothing is more graceful than the pet goat of Esmeralda.  We will pay a visit to one of the morocco-factories, premising that our independent little city of Wilmington has a wide reputation in the trade for her excellence in this special article, and that her product in morocco is actually the largest single item of her trade, the production last year having exceeded two million dollars’ worth.  We will enter a specimen factory, where the tame African goats playing about the yard, by putting their skins into contact with the powdered sumach lying up stairs in the bags, are to yield us specimens of about the best American morocco known to commerce.  The superiority of the Wilmington product is attributed by buyers to something in the quality of the Brandywine water, but probably the high condition and tone of the workmen has more to do with it.  In Wilmington, where a workman finds that a given rate of wages represents better living and more happiness than in any large city, the labor obtainable for the pay is naturally of a higher character; and this, in a business where everything depends upon hand manipulation, is a controlling influence.  The factory we select is that of Pusey, Scott & Co., at Madison and Third streets, five stories high and a hundred and sixty feet deep.  Over this scented labyrinth we go, up stairs and down; now among the slippery vats, where the hides are deprived of their hair; now into a bright room, where half a dozen pretty sewing-machine girls are stitching the wet, slimy skins into bags; now into gloomy cellars, where these bags are filled with sumach-dust and water.  The scene in these dark apartments, where many of the workmen are negroes, is especially high-flavored and like a chapter in Vathek.  Writers usually talk of “life in the iron-mills” as conducing to the development of herculean strength.  But iron-workers are apt to be dry and wiry, their flesh half sweated off and their complexions unnaturally pale.  For true muscular development, rather Flemish and beefy in quality, we would instance the workmen in this department of a morocco-factory.  The skins when filled with water are very heavy, and the jolly fellows who play at aquatic games with them, now ducking into the tanks, now holding a bag under the hopper whence the sumach descends, and anon stirring, manipulating and inspecting the mass of floating pillows, are true heroes out of Rubens’ pictures.  The scenes up stairs again, where young Swedes and Irish boys dress the dry skins, painting them over with black, and polishing and graining them by rubbing them with