CHAPTER VIII.
THE BLACK COUNTRY IN DETAIL; ITS CHIEF TOWNS AND CENTRES OF INDUSTRY—DUDLEY, STOURBRIDGE, AND HAGLEY.
HAVING thus given half this volume to a notice of Birmingham, too small a space remains for a description of The Black Country proper, of which it is the metropolis. Doubtless a majority of our English readers have passed through this remarkable district once in their lives, and remember its most striking features. To such any portraiture of it which the most graphic pen could give might be superfluous. But there is one aspect of it which I doubt if half-a-dozen of them ever witnessed; and that I would earnestly commend to their notice.
I had passed through the district on the railway many times by night and day, in summer and winter, during the past twenty years, and had seen it in all the various aspects of the changing seasons. But there was one point of view which I had never enjoyed, and which is the best that can be found
