On The Whole, However, It Is More Cheerful And Has More Of A
Country-Town Look Than Leeds - A Place Utterly Without Beauty Of Aspect.
At
Leeds you have vast barrack-like factories, with their usual suburbs of
squalid rows of brick cottages, and everywhere the tall spiracles of the
steam, which seems the pervading power of the place.
Everything there is
machinery - the machine is the intelligent agent, it would seem, the man
its slave, standing by to tend it and pick up a broken thread now and
then. At Sheffield ... you might go through most of the streets without
knowing anything of the kind was going on. And steam here, instead of
being a ruler, is a drudge, turning a grindstone or rolling out a bar of
steel, but all the accuracy and skill of hand is the Man's. And
consequently there was, we thought, a healthier aspect about the men
engaged. None of the Rodgers remain who founded the firm in my father's
time. I saw some pairs of his scissors in the show-room still kept under
the name of Persian scissors."[35]
From Sheffield Yule and his friend proceeded to Boston, "where there is
the most exquisite church tower I have ever seen," and thence to Lincoln,
Peterborough, and Ely, ending their tour at Cambridge, where Yule spent
a few delightful days.
In the autumn the great Duke of Wellington died, and Yule witnessed the
historic pageant of his funeral. His furlough was now nearly expired, and
early in December he again embarked for India, leaving his wife and only
child, of a few weeks old, behind him.
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