WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.
Sleepy travelers on the great route to Washington, having passed Philadelphia and expecting Baltimore, are attracted, if it is a way-train, by a phenomenon. The engine is observed to slacken, and a little elderly man with a lantern, looking in the twilight like an Arabian Night's phantom with one red eye in the middle of its body, places himself just in advance of the locomotive. He trots nimbly along, defending himself from incessant death by the sureness of his legs, and after a long race guides up to the station the clattering train, which is all the time threatening to catch him by the heel. "Wilmington!" shouts the brakesman. Every train into Wilmington is thus attended, as the palfrey of an Eastern pasha by the running footman. The man's life is passed in a perpetual race with destruction, and having beaten innumerable locomotives, he still survives, contentedly wagging his crimson eye, and hardly conscious that his existence is a perpetual escape.
Something quaint, peremptory, old-world and feudal strikes the traveler as adhering in this custom, by which Wilmington constantly pays for the general safety of her promenaders with the offering of a citizen's life and limbs. This impression is right. The city is the best-defined spot on the American map where the South begins and the North ends. Wilmington is, for its own part, a perfect crystal of Yankee grit, run out and fixed in a country which in the highest degree represents the soft, contented, lazy, incoherent Bourbon temper. We select it for our subject because it is so complete a terminal image. There is no other instance in the country of such sharp, close contrast. A man might step out to the city limit, and stand with one leg in full Yankeeland, thrilling with enterprise and emulation, and the other planted, as it were, in the "Patriarchal Times." Elsewhere along the effaced line of Mason and Dixon the sections die away into each other: here they stand face to face, and stare.
Wilmington's legend belongs to the general story of the settlements along the Delaware. The discoveries of its site overlapped each other, the Quakers discovering the Swedes, who had discovered the Dutch, who had discovered the Indians. It was first called Willing's Town, from a settler, and then Wilmington, from the earl of that name in England, to whom Thomson dedicated his poem of Winter. But the spirit of enterprise—the spirit whose results we are now to chronicle—came in only with William Shipley, for whose story we must refer the reader, strange as it may seem, to the latest novel of the first living master of English fiction.
This introduces to our notice the most singular literary partnership that ever was or ever will be. Dumas used to be helped out in his splendid fictions by Maquet, but Dumas and Maquet were Frenchmen, and had plenty of sympathies in common. Charles Reade, however, in his romance of The Wandering Heir, written to minister to the Tichborne excitement, takes for his helper the most unlikely colleague in nature—a grave, tranquil, intensely respectable Friend, a writer of colonial histories in a far pastoral retreat by the Delaware. Such workmen were never matched before; yet the words of Benjamin Ferris, the Wilmington antiquarian, form a part, and a telling part, of the exciting romance signed by Charles Reade. The words of Ferris, unexpectedly earning renown in a work of imagination, trace the true tale of the Quaker prophetess, Elizabeth Shipley, who brought her practical husband to Wilmington through the influence of a brilliant dream. The words of Ferris, adopted and sold to the publishers by Reade, describe the terrestrial Paradise now known as Wilmington in just those glowing and golden terms we should have needed for the prologue to this article if we had not been so anticipated. Reade, so long as he keeps up his partnership with Ferris, is safe, sane and true. It would have been well if he had kept it up a little longer, for the moment he lets go Ferris's coat-cuff he falls into mistakes—calling the Delaware hereabouts a "bay," and speaking of a prickly-pear hedge on a farm only sixty miles from Philadelphia.
