THE TOWN OF BELFAST.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 130, 29 October 1875, Page 12

THE TOWN OF BELFAST.

A lively, flourishing town, Belfast — a town where the men are all busy, the women all pretty, tlie horses all fine and fast, the streets all clean and well paved, the beggars few, and the champagne lunches plenty ; a town where the air is always brisk, where the daylight in summer lasts until almost midnight, where a hundred regiments of stout artisans do good work, and are amply paid for it ; a town essentially American in spirit and intimately allied in a hundred ways to the great metropolis of the New World j a town which sent A. T. Stewart to New York, and wliicli has dozens of merchant princes of its own ; a town where dissent and religious difference now and then bubble over into fights which render necessary the presence of A.rrqstrong guns on the streets and regiments of constables and soldier\^S*> action ; a town where barricades sometimes spring up like mushrooms, and Orange heads are broken by Catholic clubs, while Catholic eyes are blackened by Orange fists; a town w hero within a few hundred yards of each other there are immense mills, each employing about the same number of operatives, in one of which every man, woman, and child employed is Catholic, and in the other every child, woman, and man is Protestant, and inimical to the other? ; a town in which the pulses arc fluick, the passions strong, the commercial loyalty absolutely, unalterable, and the linens unsurpassed ; a town where one has just the slightest suspicion oi' a Scotch burr in the speech, caiising him to remember that the spirits and capacities of two of the finest races of the North are there brought into play in unison; a town while already boasts more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, has doubled its population within the last fifteen years, and means to do it again within the next decade ; a town which frowns on pleasant old Dublin in patronizing fashion and condemns her as unenterprising and slow j a town which reminds one singularly of Chicago, just as a Chicago man would say, doubtless, tliat Dublin reminds him of St. Louis ; a town \\hose fine harbor is crowded with shipping, whose Exchange is daily packed -with prosperous merchants, where the common people take newspapers and read tlicm, and where nothing is ever clone by chance, done by halves, and a town set down in the centre of one of the most exquisitely beautiful sections of country in Northern Europe, and surrounded with suburbs renowned for their charms. — 'New York Herald.'