Along the pavement walk bonnetless women, with shawls drawn over their heads, and their hair and clothes spotted with white fluffs of cotton. In the pathway, and at the corners of the principal streets, stand groups of merchants and manufacturers—all with their hands in their pockets—some buried in their coat-tails—others plunged deep in their breeches, and rattling the money—and each busy trafficking with his neighbour. Beside the kerb-stones loiter bright-coloured omnibuses, the tired horses with their heads hanging low down, and their trembling knees bulging forward—and with the drab-coated and big-buttoned driver loitering by their side, and ready to convey the merchants to their suburban homes. Go which way you will, the whistle of some arriving or departing railway-train shrieks shrilly in the ears; and at the first break of morning, a thousand factory bells ring out the daily summons to work—and then, as the shades of night fall upon the town, the many windows of the huge mills and warehouses shine like plates of burnished gold with the myriads of lights within. The streets, streaming with children going to or coming from their toil, are black with the moving columns of busy little things, like the paths to an ants’ nest. Within the factories, the clatter and whirr of incalculable wheels stuns and bewilders the mind. Here, in long low rooms, are vistas of carding-engines, some disgorging thick sheets of white, soft-looking wadding, and others pouring forth endless fluffy ropes of cotton into tall tin cylinders; while over-head are wheels, with their rims worn bright, and broad black straps descending from them on every side, with their buckles running rapidly round, and making the stranger shrink as he passes between them. On the floors above are mules after mules, with long lines of white cops, twirling so fast that their forms are all blurred together; while the barefooted artisan between draws out the slender threads as from the bowels of a thousand spiders. Then too there are floors crowded with looms all at work, tramping like an army, and busy weaving the shirts and gowns of the entire world, and making the stranger wonder how, with the myriads of bales of cotton that are here spun, and with the myriads of yards of cotton that are here woven, there can be one bare back to be found among the whole human family. But Manchester, at the time of Mr. Sandboy’s visit, was not the Manchester of every-day life.