with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New
England church and school-house; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you
have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the
stumps, the logs, the stagnant water – all so like the last that
you seem to have been transported back again by magic.
The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild
impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is
only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of
there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road,
where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a
rough wooden arch, on which is painted ‘WHEN THE BELL RINGS, LOOK
OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE.’ On it whirls headlong, dives through the
woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches,
rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which
intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all
the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and
dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of
the road. There – with mechanics working at their trades, and
people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites
and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and
children crawling, and pigs burrowing, and unaccustomed horses
plunging and rearing, close to the very rails – there – on, on, on
– tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars;
scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its
wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the
thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people
cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.
I was met at the station at Lowell by a gentleman intimately
connected with the management of the factories there; and gladly
putting myself under his guidance, drove off at once to that
quarter of the town in which the works, the object of my visit,
were situated. Although only just of age – for if my recollection
serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty
years – Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place. Those
indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a
quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old
country, is amusing enough. It was a very dirty winter’s day, and
nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which
in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited
there, on the subsiding of the waters after the Deluge. In one
place, there was a new wooden church, which, having no steeple, and
being yet unpainted, looked like an enormous packing-case without
any direction upon it. In another there was a large hotel, whose
walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it
had exactly the appearance of being built with cards. I was
careful not to draw my breath as we passed, and trembled when I saw
a workman come out upon the roof, lest with one thoughtless stamp
of his foot he should crush the structure beneath him, and bring it
rattling down. The very river that moves the machinery in the
mills (for they are all worked by water power), seems to acquire a
new character from the fresh buildings of bright red brick and
painted wood among which it takes its course; and to be as lightheaded,
thoughtless, and brisk a young river, in its murmurings and
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Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
tumblings, as one would desire to see. One would swear that every
‘Bakery,’ ‘Grocery,’ and ‘Bookbindery,’ and other kind of store,
took its shutters down for the first time, and started in business
yesterday. The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the
sun-blind frames outside the Druggists’, appear to have been just
turned out of the United States’ Mint; and when I saw a baby of
some week or ten days old in a woman’s arms at a street corner, I
found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from: never