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publishers in this city one of the compositions named, "Old Folks
at Home," "Willie, we have missed you," and the beautiful quartette,
"Come where my love lies dreaming," seeming to have the most lasting
hold upon the popular fancy. All these songs were born under practical
Pittsburgh's canopy of smoke, and in the very heart of her roar and
tumult.
Near the beautiful cemetery where lies
the dead composer is noted the arched portals of the Allegheny Arsenal,
flanked with flag-stones worn into hollows by the tread of succeeding
generations of sentries. Within the low wall great Columbiads bask in
pleasant sunshine, and pyramids of solid shot show their grim outlines
among apple blossoms and neat flower beds. From these gates there issued
in the month of December, 1860, a shipment of cannon in compliance with
an order from the then Secretary of War, Floyd.
A few minutes' drive from the
arsenal there looms up a great, many-windowed building at the edge
of the Allegheny. This, during the civil war, was to the Union what
the Tredegar Iron Works were to the Confederacy. The Fort Pitt Cannon
Foundry—now no more as such—cast guns that spoke victory on
Lake Erie in 1812, that a generation later thundered before the gates
of Mexico, and furnished, during the civil war, two thousand cannon,
from the twenty-inch Columbiad
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to the six-pounder or field-piece. And to complete the grim
list, these works cast 10,000,000 pounds of shot and shell between the
years of 1861 and 1864.
The visitor who would most enjoy the
City of Smoke must keep his eyes open. And if he uses well his eyes he
will note a hundred objects of interest that are beyond the scope of this
article even to consider: great cotton mills that are humming hives of
whirling spindles; a firmament of lights flashing on the swift water of
three rivers; great bridges of iron and wood thrown across these storied
streams. Other streams there are whose currents and eddies are humanity.
They are the streets of the city on some pleasant Saturday evening.
An army of ten thousand men, whose individual earnings vary from five
dollars to five hundred dollars per week, is abroad in the narrow gas-lit
thoroughfare. They are seeking amusement, and, generally speaking,
find it. In the concert saloon, the billiard hall, the bowling alley
or drinking saloon, are found these workers in iron and steel and glass.
They are supremely content, orderly, generally sober and thrifty.
They form one of the sights of the city.
In fact, to the intelligent observer,
Pittsburgh is a great kaleidoscope, showing new attractions at every turn.
The place is a big, many-leaved volume of such scope that a tithe only
of its contents can be given in these glances at some of its most salient
features.
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