would come the long lines of Conestoga wagons, from distant counties, such as Dauphin and Berks, with fat horses, and wagoners persuading them by means of biblical oaths jabbered in Pennsylvania Dutch.  From these mills Washington removed the runners (or upper stones), lest they should be seized and used by the British, hauling them up into Chester county.  When independence was secured the State of Delaware hastened to pass laws putting foreign trade on a more liberal footing than the neighbor commonwealths, thus securing for her mills the enviable commerce with the West Indies.  Much shipping was thus attracted to Wilmington, and the trade with Cuba in corn-meal was particularly large.  It was found, however, that the flour of maize invariably rotted in a tropical voyage, and thereupon the commodity known as kiln-dried corn was invented at the Brandywine Mills:  two hundred bushels would be dried per day on brick floors, and be thought a large amount, though the “pan-kiln” now in use dries two thousand in the same time.  The dried meal was delivered at Havana perfectly fresh, and pay received, in those good old days of barter, in Jamaica rum, sugar and coffees.  In the old times flour was heaped in the barrels and patted down with wooden shovels:  then, when full, a cloth was laid over the top, and the fattest journeyman on the premises clambered up to a seat on the heap, to “cheese it down” and imprint his callipyge upon it.  Flour thus made and branded was always safe to bring a high price, but never so high as in the short epoch of the Continental currency, when the old entries of the Brandywine Mill books show (1780) wheat bought at twenty-four pounds a bushel, a pair of the miller’s leather small-clothes at eighty pounds, and some three or four hundred barrels of his flour charged at a gross sum of twenty-one thousand pounds.

The fine old mills are still in lively operation, manufacturing into meal about a million bushels of wheat and Indian corn every year.  The principal proprietor receives us in his domain, the living image of easy, old-fashioned prosperity, and narrates the long history of the structures, showing his little museum of curiosities—­now a whale’s jaw bequeathed from the old fishing days, now a Revolutionary cannon-ball—­and helps us to realize the ancient times by means of the music of the mill, which is loquacious now as it was under George III.

Such is a specimen of one of the stout old industries of a hundred years ago, still surviving and hale as ever, though out of its former proportion amongst the immense enterprises of modern days.  This article, however, must pass out of the atmosphere of ancient tradition as quickly as possible, being intended to show the handsome city of Wilmington with its sleeves rolled up as it were, and in the thick of the hardest work belonging to the nineteenth century.  When steam was introduced to revolutionize labor, and railroads came to supplement water-transport, they found the manufacturers of this prosperous town ready to avail themselves of every improvement, and pass at once from the chrysalis state into the soaring development of modern enterprise.