Stockport, in its local patriotism, would probably resent being lumped with “Manchester,” and Manchester itself might object, but to the passer-by, ignorant of local divisions, it is all one with the great city, although the town is not even in the same county with it; the river Mersey here dividing Stockport in Cheshire, from Manchester in Lancashire. Cheshire, in its most characteristic condition, is the Cheshire of the cheese-farms in the great fertile plain, where mild-eyed cows stand knee-deep in pastures; and a great manufacturing town is entirely out of sympathy with such idyllic scenes. I give you my word there are no idylls in Stockport: only a road where the granite setts are greasy; the pavements thronged with busy people and the girls of the cotton-mills; the sky smoky, and the air filled with distracting noise. But to see a less crowded and less noisy Stockport would be a sorry thing, for it is the wealth-producing commerce of the place that makes it what it is, and the times when the railway-lorries cease to crash and rumble along the streets, and when the waggons, laden with mountainous heights of grey shirtings, are no longer seen on their way from the cotton-mills to Manchester warehouses, will be troublous times for not only mill-hand and manufacturer, but for every one. Commerce is typified in the statues that decorate public buildings by a woman of noble proportions, clothed in classic dress, and in her face a majestic calm; but that is an abstraction. Commerce as understood here—and indeed everywhere—is a matter of telegrams and telephones, of bales, packing-cases, and feverish hurry; and I suppose—if you must feminise—the nearest real human beings to that classic convention are the mill-girls and the typists. For the rest, commerce is what you perceive here; a polluted river, darkened by factories, bridges, and railway viaducts; and great goods yards, advertisement hoardings, banks, and the hundred-and-one kinds of buildings in which the business of the twentieth century is carried on. The tall railway viaduct that spans the Mersey and goes high over the steep and grimy streets leading down to it, is impressive in its very bulk and in the smoky atmosphere that reveals it only in a broad flat effect; and, in the same way, the towering buildings that have no beauty of detail, gloom down upon you with an ogreish aspect that transcends their ugliness and elevates it into the region of horrific romance.