Hamilton Palace 292 Bothwell Bridge 295 Trongate 305 The Arms of Glasgow 309 Glasgow Cathedral and the Necropolis 311 The Oldest House in Glasgow 317 “Dixon’s Blazes” 321 THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD I London Road Railway Station nowadays marks the beginning of central Manchester. Hitherto the long, long approach, although busy and crowded, has been, if not a thought suburban, at least busy chiefly on the retail scale. Here, however, where the railway brings travellers in from London, you see Manchester as the great city of immense warehouses: the place that no longer manufactures but deals in bulk and by wholesale with the goods produced in a dependent circle of towns. From London Road you come immediately into Piccadilly, which is not in the least like the Piccadilly in London; and there you find yourself at the very hub of Manchester’s hurly-burly. There is perhaps not much significance in all this to the commercial man who travels down by express from London, and merely rouses himself from his newspaper to alight and then to take a cab from this railway terminus to one of the others, or to his business appointments; but to trace the road down from London on a bicycle and thus enter Manchester is to understand the great metropolis of cotton as it really is in relation to the rest of the country. To such a traveller the noise, the crowds, the furious energy, and the great sooty piles of buildings are not a little terrible. There is much good modern architecture in Manchester’s streets, but a black cloak covers it all. And yet the sky, though generally overcast, for the climate of Manchester is tearful, is not scored with smoke-wreaths, and factory-chimneys are not a feature of Manchester itself. The sooty deposit comes insensibly in the air from the outer ring of towns, and although it is not evident in the sky, it very soon tones down brick and stone and terra-cotta to one dull monotone. For all the rain that washes the city, it does not suffice to cleanse away its coating of soot. The blackness of Manchester is the first characteristic that impresses itself upon the stranger. It greatly impressed the first Shah of Persia who visited England: Nasr-ed-din, who came in 1873, and afterwards wrote an account of his travels. “The City of Manchester,” he wrote, “by reason of its exceeding number of manufactures, has its houses, doors, and walls black as coal, and the complexions, visages, and the dress of people are all black. The whole of the ladies of that place at most times wear black clothing, because no sooner do they put on white or coloured garments, than they are suddenly black!” [Sidenote: _BLACK MANCHESTER_]