"How often," says the type of the true Lancashire poet, most genial of his race,--the late Edwin Waugh,--"how often have I heard some fine psalm-tune streaming in chorus from female voices when passing cotton-mills at work, and mingling with the spoom of thousands of spindles." That the girls in particular are not unhappy is shown by their preference of the cotton-mill to domestic service. Their health is as good as that of any other class of operatives; and though they have to keep upon their feet, it is not for so long a time as young women in city shops. Of course there is a shadowy side to life identified with the factory. The hands do not live in Elysium, any more than the agricultural labourer does in Arcadia. The masters, as everywhere else, are both good and bad: in the aggregate they are no worse than their fellows in other places, and to expect them to be better would be premature. In case of grievance or abuse there is an "inspector" to apply to for remedy. The wages are as good as those earned by any other large class of English work-people; and if the towns in which so many abide are unlovely, the Lancashire cotton-operatives at all events know little or nothing of the vice and filth of metropolitan St. Giles'. IV MANCHESTER The writer of the entertaining article in the _Cornhill_ for February 1880 upon "The Origin of London" shows that had the choice of the best site for a capital to be made _now_, and for the first time, the selection would naturally fall upon south-east Lancashire, and on the particular spot covered by modern Manchester. Geographically, as the author points out, it is the centre of the three kingdoms; and its advantageousness in regard to commerce, all things considered, is paramount. These facts alone suffice to give interest to the locality; and that the town itself should have acquired the importance now possessed, in some respects almost metropolitan, looks not so much like accident or good fortune as the fulfilment of a law of Nature. The locality in question is by no means picturesque. The ground, as said before, is, on the Cheshire side, and westwards, nearly level, the country being here bordered by the Mersey, a river, as Pennant long ago remarked, utterly devoid along its course of the charms usually identified with fairly broad and winding streams. At Northen there are some pleasant shaded pathways, with willows and poplars like those upon which _OEnone_ was carved; but the bank, if much above the level, is artificial, the original having been raised with a view to protecting the adjacent fields from inundation in time of floods, such as occur not infrequently--the Mersey being formed in the beginning by the confluence of several minor streams, which gather their waters from the moors and the Derbyshire hills, and are apt to be well filled and of rapid movement.