We arrived at Birmingham at 8:45 p.m.  Between Wolverhampton and Birmingham lies the great ore and manufacturing district of England.  Ore-beds and smoke-stacks cover all the area some thirty miles long and sixteen miles wide, except that occupied by the miserable cottages (some of them mere hovels) of the laborers.  Looking at this immense area from the cars, it presents the appearance of one continuous town.  No wonder that England can accommodate a population of some twenty odd millions on an area but little more than that of Pennsylvania, when poor humanity is thus crowded together.  In the cars, I had formed the acquaintance of a sociable party of ladies and gentlemen, who pointed out places to me, and instructed me concerning the manners and social habits of the people.  From Liverpool hither, I found very small brick houses the rule and spacious buildings like our Pennsylvania farm houses, the exception.  Barns, I saw none; small stables supply their places even on large farms.  We saw several very fine castles by the way, however.

Birmingham is known as “the toy-shop of Europe,” “but most of the toys are for children of larger growth.”  One can nowhere see richer sights than in the show-rooms of many of these shops.  One that I visited, a glass show-room containing chandeliers priced upwards of a thousand dollars, and all varieties of fancy-wares of every description, had large mirrors at the ends of the room, covering the entire walls, and producing the grandest effect conceivable.  The objects in the room were thus infinitely multiplied in both directions, so that whichever way one turned his face, glittering glassware was seen “as far as the eye could reach.”

Such sights are simply bewildering!  It is a little difficult to gain admittance to the manufacturing departments of many of these places, but to literary characters that represent “newspapers,” the doors are generally opened quite readily.  In hunting these shops, I discovered a great want of system in the naming and numbering of the streets of this otherwise quite elegant city.  I had passed a certain street twice, from end to end, in search of a particular number.  Upon further inquiry, I learned that what I had considered one street, was numbered and named as two, though there was not the slightest deviation from a perfectly straight line at any point of it.  To make bad worse, the houses were counted and numbered upwards on one side of the street, and downwards on the other side.  In such a city the stranger must find places by speculation!

Strange things one meets at every step in Europe, and soon gets so used to it, that it seems the strangest to see something that is not strange; but oddities are perhaps no plentier on one side of the Atlantic than they are on the other, and are equally amusing everywhere.  Upon the burial ground of St. Philip’s, stands a monument in honor and memory of a wife that died at the age of fifty-nine years, which has a bee-hive and the inscription:  “She looked well to the ways of her household, and did not eat the bread of idleness.”