WALKS IN THE BLACK COUNTRY
AND
ITS GREEN BORDER-LAND.
CHAPTER I.
THE BLACK COUNTRY, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe. It is a section of Titanic industry, kept in murky perspiration by a sturdy set of Tubal Cains and Vulcans, week in week out, and often seven days to the week. Indeed the Sunday evening halo it wears when the church bells are ringing to service on winter nights, glows "redder than the moon," or like the moon dissolved at its full on the clouds above the roaring furnaces. It is a little dual world of itself, only to be gauged perpendicularly. The better half, it may be, faces
