The contrasts offered by London itself are hardly greater than those to be found in Liverpool; the physical division of the great town into high and low is not more marked than its moral division into luxury and want, into respectability and infamy, into leisure and toil. There is a calm, tranquil, well-bred comfort about some of the uncommercial districts of Liverpool as characteristic and as striking as the splendour of its great streets, the long line of shops, each displaying the products of the teeming wealth of many countries, and are lost in those wonderful masses of warehouses, stores, factories, and shipping offices, which epitomise the whole history of commerce in its greatest forms, while they exhibit it in its minutest detail. The actual story of the world in its most practical, and at the same time not in its least romantic, aspect may be read by him who runs--if his hurried way should take him past the great landing-stages which project upon the Mersey. All the interests of life in its present crowded phase, and in its extended intercourse of business and of greatness, find their symbols there; its transitoriness, its change, its tumultuous variety, its youthful hope, its keenest anxieties, its bitterest partings, have found their theatre there since the first ship brought in the wealth of a foreign land, and the first ship carried out the produce of our own. The steadiest industry, the most inveterate vagabondism, find their representatives among the population of Liverpool; there is no place in existence in which the student of human nature may discover more to interest, to edify, to puzzle, and to appal him. The sailor who had travelled by the five-o'clock train to Liverpool was seemingly possessed by a great curiosity concerning the commercial city. He had not eaten or drunk since early in the day; but this circumstance, rarely devoid of interest to persons of his class, seemed to trouble him but little. He had not turned into any eating-house, he had not visited any drinking-bar; but he took his way slowly, and always meditatively, along the streets which led to the water-side. In Water-street he lingered long. The great business centres and conduits were emptying themselves of the swarms of human beings whose business lies in the deep waters, who, if they did not go down to the sea in ships themselves, spent their lives in business matters connected with those who do; hurrying crowds jostled the sailor upon the pathways, crowds whose backs were turned upon the direction in which he was going; and as he took his way at a lounging pace, which contrasted curiously with the vigorous hurry and breaking-up air of bustle around him which marks the close of the business day in Liverpool, and the 'coming on of evening mild,' with its welcome recreation, at home or elsewhere, according to the diversity of tastes. The water-side was almost deserted when he debouched upon it from Water-street under the shadow of the huge warehouses.