I Was Never More In Love With Smoke And Dirt Than When I Stood Here And Watched The Darkness Of Night Close In Upon The Floating Soot Which Hovered Over The House-Tops Of The City.

I cannot say that I saw the sun set, for there was no sun.

I should say that the sun never shone at Pittsburg, as foreigners who visit London in November declare that the sun never shines there.

Walking along the river side I counted thirty-two steamers, all beached upon the shore, with their bows toward the land - large boats, capable probably of carrying from one to two hundred passengers each, and about three hundred tons of merchandise. On inquiry I found that many of these were not now at work. They were resting idle, the trade down the Mississippi below St. Louis having been cut off by the war. Many of them, however, were still running, the passage down the river being open to Wheeling in Virginia, to Portsmouth, Cincinnati, and the whole of South Ohio, to Louisville in Kentucky, and to Cairo in Illinois, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. The amount of traffic carried on by these boats while the country was at peace within itself was very great, and conclusive as to the increasing prosperity of the people. It seems that everybody travels in America, and that nothing is thought of distance. A young man will step into a car and sit beside you, with that easy careless air which is common to a railway passenger in England who is passing from one station to the next; and on conversing with him you will find that he is going seven or eight hundred miles. He is supplied with fresh newspapers three or four times a day as he passes by the towns at which they are published; he eats a large assortment of gum-drops and apples, and is quite as much at home as in his own house. On board the river boats it is the same with him, with this exception, that when there he can get whisky when he wants it. He knows nothing of the ennui of traveling, and never seems to long for the end of his journey, as travelers do with us. Should his boat come to grief upon the river, and lay by for a day or a night, it does not in the least disconcert him. He seats himself upon three chairs, takes a bite of tobacco, thrusts his hand into his trowsers pockets, and revels in an elysium of his own.

I was told that the stockholders in these boats were in a bad way at the present time. There were no dividends going. The same story was repeated as to many and many an investment. Where the war created business, as it had done on some of the main lines of railroad and in some special towns, money was passing very freely; but away from this, ruin seemed to have fallen on the enterprise of the country. Men were not broken hearted, nor were they even melancholy; but they were simply ruined. That is nothing in the States, so long as the ruined man has the means left to him of supplying his daily wants till he can start himself again in life. It is almost the normal condition of the American man in business; and therefore I am inclined to think that when this war is over, and things begin to settle themselves into new grooves, commerce will recover herself more quickly there than she would do among any other people. It is so common a thing to hear of an enterprise that has never paid a dollar of interest on the original outlay - of hotels, canals, railroads, banks, blocks of houses, etc. that never paid even in the happy days of peace - that one is tempted to disregard the absence of dividends, and to believe that such a trifling accident will not act as any check on future speculation. In no country has pecuniary ruin been so common as in the States; but then in no country is pecuniary ruin so little ruinous. "We are a recuperative people," a west-country gentleman once said to me. I doubted the propriety of his word, but I acknowledged the truth of his assertion.

Pittsburg and Alleghany - which latter is a town similar in its nature to Pittsburg, on the other side of the river of the same name - regard themselves as places apart; but they are in effect one and the same city. They live under the same blanket of soot, which is woven by the joint efforts of the two places. Their united population is 135,000, of which Alleghany owns about 50,000. The industry of the towns is of that sort which arises from a union of coal and iron in the vicinity. The Pennsylvanian coal fields are the most prolific in the Union; and Pittsburg is therefore great, exactly as Merthyr-Tydvil and Birmingham are great. But the foundery work at Pittsburg is more nearly allied to the heavy, rough works of the Welsh coal metropolis than to the finish and polish of Birmingham.

"Why cannot you consume your own smoke?" I asked a gentleman there. "Fuel is so cheap that it would not pay," he answered. His idea of the advantage of consuming smoke was confined to the question of its paying as a simple operation in itself. The consequent cleanliness and improvement in the atmosphere had not entered into his calculations. Any such result might be a fortuitous benefit, but was not of sufficient importance to make any effort in that direction expedient on its own account. "Coal was burned," he said, "in the founderies at something less than two dollars a ton; while that was the case, it could not answer the purpose of any iron- founder to put up an apparatus for the consumption of smoke?" I did not pursue the argument any further, as I perceived that we were looking at the matter from two different points of view.

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