from the car window, there, _there_ it was! but beyond a
glimpse of something very long and very straight marking the
landscape with lines no more convincing than those which science
was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on the
planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not my
fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of
Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right
hands, but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In
the local delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness
might have befriended the ignorance of the stranger were "away on
their holidays": that was exactly the phrase.

When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was
borne to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the
important scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other
public buildings of Manchester, is most dignified, and the great
hall of the exchange is very noble. I would not, if I could, have
repressed a thrill of pride in seeing our national colors and
emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at one end of the
room, but these were the only things American in the impression
left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on
the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found
a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the
vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few
silk toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other
straws. The marketing was not carried on with anything like the
wild, rangy movement of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up
no such hell-roaring (there is no other phrase for it) tumult as
rises from the mad but not malign demons of that most dramatic
representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid, whether