Day after day the goodly ships had borne their load across the Atlantic, from New Orleans and the other cotton ports; day after day those Liverpool cotton lords had received that load upon their docks, and those Manchester cotton lords had bartered with them and bought it; and it had been borne slowly along, piled up on great lorries, or it had been whirled along the iron road, and unloaded, and carried to a thousand factories in Manchester, and Bolton, and Oldham--the giant consumers; in Rochdale, and Bury, and Burnley; Blackburn and Wigan, and Ashton and Stockport; to the great, young, growing towns; to strange moorland villages, younger sisters of the towns; and there thickset spikes had whirled it about, and combs had smoothed it out; revolving spindles had spun it into the thickest or the most fairy threads; rows and rows of shining looms had received it, and woven it into every conceivable variety of texture and colour, and breadth, and length, and pattern. Skilled workmen and workwomen, deft-handed, lissome, soft-fingered craftsmen and craftswomen had stood by their wooden and metal fellow-workers, and fed their untiring jaws; then it had gone to the white-looking warehouses, to be piled in great masses, like little mountains for height and solidity, and from thence removed to ships again, and borne over the seas to India, and China, and America, and to every town in Europe where men and women needed clothing and had money to buy it. The glory of King Cotton at this period of his reign, and the splendour of him, cannot be better summed up than in the graphic words of one who has thought and written on that great subject:--