other questions besides; and at parting, she invited me to visit her at her house in Bedfordshire, within half a day's journey of Olney. She was at present residing with a friend, she said; but she would be at home in less than a fortnight; and there was much in her neighborhood which, she was sure, it would give me pleasure to see. I was unable ultimately to avail myself of her kindness; but in the hope that these chapters may yet meet her eye, 1 must be permitted to reiterate my sincere thanks for her frank and hospitable invitation. The frankness struck me at the time as characteristically English; while the hospitality associated well with all I had previously known of the Society of Friends.
I marked, in passing on to Leeds, a new feature in the husbandry of the district,—whole fields of teazles, in flower at the time, waving gray in the breeze. They indicated that I was approaching the great centre of the cloth-trade in England. The larger heads of this plant, bristling over with their numerous minute hooks, are employed as a kind of brushes or combs for raising the nap of the finer broadcloths; and it seems a curious enough circumstance that, in this mechanical age, so famous for the ingenuity and niceness of its machines, no effort of the mechanician has as yet enabled him to supersede, or even to rival, this delicate machine of nature's making. I failed to acquaint myself very intimately with Leeds: the rain had again returned, after a brief interval of somewhat less that two days; and I saw, under cover of my old friend the umbrella, but the outsides of the two famous cloth-halls of the place, where there are more woollen stuffs bought and sold than in any other dozer buildings in the world; and its long uphill-street of shops, with phlegmatic Queen Anne looking grimly adown the slope, from her niche of dingy sandstone. On the following morning, which was wet and stormy as ever, I took
