I have never seen any information as to the stages of the Industrial Revolution in Germany. Naturally it came at a later date than our own and was able to benefit by our mistakes. But to what influence does it owe a character so different? Here in the lower Rhineland there are big industrial towns and great factories. These places are not beautiful, but they lack the overpowering dirt and ugliness of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All along the lower Rhine one factory succeeds another, but they consume their own smoke and fumes and are not allowed to tyrannise over the district. Düsseldorf even more than Cologne is a great manufacturing centre, and among other industries has large machine and puddling works in its suburbs. But the public gardens of the town, which are of great extent and beauty, might be a hundred miles removed from a factory. Leverkusen, the great dyeworks near Cologne, has the appearance of a model village. It is all to the credit of Germany that she has not allowed herself to be obsessed by that spirit of helpless fatalism which has descended on too many of the manufacturing districts and towns in England. Men and women’s lives are spent amid this grime, to the detriment of soul as well as body. It is a valuable object lesson to learn that, granted energy and a will to be clean, some of the drawbacks of an ugly industrialism can be avoided for the workers. Lancashire and Yorkshire have one feature in common with the German industrial centres on the lower Rhine. Both have their own beautiful hinterland. The German hinterland in question has nothing so grand and so austere to show as the great heather-clad moors and rugged dales of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But withal the rural districts of this smiling Bergische Land, with its wooded valleys and running streams and black and white houses buried deep among orchards, lie, so it seems, within a stone’s throw of factories and workshops. Full of charm are these little valleys, divided one from another by narrow watersheds. All of a family, yet each possesses its own features and has the impress of its own personality. A trout stream almost invariably meanders along the valley, sometimes finding its way through meadows of long lush grass, Alpine in its greenness, sometimes flowing among overhanging woods where the murmur of the waters mingles with the rustling of the leaves or the deeper, more melancholy note of the fir boughs. It is a smiling, almost park-like land, richly cultivated and well populated. There are no wild or desert places. Everything perhaps is a trifle sophisticated. Many of the black and white cottages, gabled and romantic, might have stepped off the light-comedy stage. Here and there the moated tower of some ruined Burg or an eighteenth-century country house set back in a walled garden strikes the same note. This is not Nature in her strength and power, but Nature laughing,