ON DOMESTIC MANUFACTURES. 53 



she is pounding "Jim Crow ;" and our friend kindly suggests to her 

 that she would make better music on a spinning wheel, but she is 

 informed that this household implement no longer exists. She goes 

 into the kitchen, where, instead of the ample open fire-place, with 

 its logs of green wood and crackling faggots, she sees an iron stove 

 or cooking range, the fire of which is supplied with fragments of a 

 kind of black stone, and she wonders how they contrive to make it 

 burn. She wishes to light a lamp, and asks for a tinder box. They 

 take a Uttle stick and rub it on the wall, and forth comes ^re. To 

 her this is a greater mystery than was the lamp of Aladdin in the 

 days of her fairy worship, and she starts back with afiVight. 



She is informed that the people of this generation are accustomed 

 to travel twenty miles an hour without horses, in carriages propelled 

 by boiling water, and she is of course incredulous. We conduct her 

 to the rail road, to see the cars come in from the East. She mutely 

 watches the long train as it winds its way in the distance, wreathed 

 in a black cloud of smoke. Now the iron horse comes prancing along 

 with apparently increasing swiftness, and then with loud snorting 

 and neighing, plunges with all his load of human freight into the bow- 

 els of the earth beneath the city ! We, who have so long been fa- 

 miliar with this noble triumph of modern science and skill, will not 

 wonder at her astonishment as she gazes into the smoky cavern where 

 the train disappeared. We now tell her that by the same agency, 

 ships cross the Atlantic in ten days, and she is better prepared to 

 believe it. She asks if the letter post is despatched from Salem 

 oftener than once a week, and we inform her that messages may be 

 sent every hour to Washington, and an answer returned, while she is 

 walking from Beverly bridge to Chestnut street. " Washington ! — 

 Beverly bridge ! — Chestnut street !" she exclaims — she never had 

 heard the names before. In fact, Ave had entirely forgotten that these 

 localities had no existence in her day. She listens with surprise and 

 delight to accounts of the great discoveries in Astronomy, by which 

 llerschell, the Asteroids, Neptune, and a host of Satelites and Com- 

 ets have been added to the family of our solar system. She hears 

 not only of those, and other modern discoveries, but of the rapid 

 diffusion of knowledge among the people, by means of the newspaper 

 and periodical press, and cheap postage. 



She had heard nothing of the art of amputating limbs without 

 i pain, of miking portraits by sunshine, of firing guns without flint or 



