In Middleton I was impressed with the constant repetition of “front rooms” or “parlors.” You could look in through scores of partly open doors (this climate is damp but not cold) and see in each a chest of drawers exactly like every other chest in the town and in the same position relative to the door. Nearly all the round tables which these front rooms contained were covered with pink, patterned, cotton tablecloths. The small single windows, one to each house, contained blue or yellow jardinières set on small tables and containing geraniums. The fireplace, always to the right of the room as you looked in the window, glowed with a small coal fire. There were no other ornaments that I saw. The ceilings of the rooms were exceedingly low and the total effect was one of clean, frugal living. The great mills bore pleasing names, such as Rob Roy, Tabitha, Marietta, and their towering stacks looked down upon the humbler habitations at their base much as the famous castles of the feudal barons must have looked down upon the huts of their serfs. I was constrained to think of the workaday existence that all this suggested, the long lines of cotton-mill employees going in at seven o’clock in the morning, in the dark, and coming out at six o’clock at night, in the dark. Many of these mills employ a day and a night shift. Their windows, when agleam in the smoke or rain, are like patins of fine gold. I saw them gleaming at the end of dull streets or across the smooth, olive-colored surfaces of mill ponds or through the mist and rain. The few that were running (the majority of them were shut down because of the strike) had a roar like that of Niagara tumbling over its rocks--a rich, ominous thunder. In recent years the mill-owners have abandoned the old low, two-story type of building with its narrow windows and dingy aspect of gray stone, and erected in its stead these enormous structures--the only approach to the American sky-scraper I saw in England. They are magnificent mills, far superior to those you will see to-day in this country, clean, bright and--every one I saw--new. If I should rely upon my merely casual impression, I should say that there were a thousand such within twenty-five miles of Manchester. When seen across a foreground of low cottages, such as I have described, they have all the dignity of cathedrals--vast temples of labor. I was told by the American Consul-General at London that they are equipped with the very latest cotton-spinning machinery and are now in a position to hold their own on equal terms with American competition, if not utterly to defy it. The intricacy and efficiency of the machinery is greater than that employed in our mills. I could not help thinking what a far cry it was from these humble cottages, some few of which in odd corners looked like the simple, thatched huts sacred to Burns and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” to these lordly mills and the lordly owners behind them--the strong, able, ruthless men