Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885

Birth and Parentage-Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 'Forties-A Visit to St.

Andrews-The Scottish Sabbath-First Acquaintance with a Printing

Office-Tyneside in the Mid-Century-In Peril of Housebreakers-At Dr.

Collingwood Bruce's School-A Plague of Flies-Cholera-Fire.

It was in the old town, now the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne that I first saw the light-March 29, 1842. My father, the Rev. Alexander Reid, was trained first at the University of St. Andrews, under Dr. Chalmers, and afterwards at Highbury College, London, under Dr. Pye-Smith, for the Congregational ministry. On leaving College he settled in 1830 at Newcastle, and there remained for half a century a faithful and honoured preacher, retiring in 1880 amid the esteem of the whole community on Tyneside. He died in 1887 under the roof of my younger brother Stuart, at Wilmslow, Cheshire, a year which was memorable to me in other than a sorrowful sense, since it was then that I settled in London. It was said of my father at the time of his death, in one of the Newcastle papers, that for a man to be in difficulty or sorrow was a passport to his help and sympathy. My mother was the daughter of Thomas Wemyss, of Darlington, a well known Biblical scholar and critic, a kinsman of the poet Campbell, and a direct descendant of the Stewarts of Ascog, Bute, a family which traced its descent in unbroken succession-with the bar sinister at the start-from Robert II. of Scotland.

Of the six children who grew up in the austerely simple but happy surroundings of my father's home, the eldest, Mary, was the daughter of my father by a previous marriage; she married the Rev. William Bathgate, D.D., of Kilmarnock, and died as recently as 1903, to my great sorrow. My elder brother James, with whom I was most closely associated in boyhood and youth, was always more or less of an invalid, and died at Leeds in 1880-the year in which our mother also passed away. I came next in the family, and my younger brothers are Alexander, now manager of the Dublin and Wexford Railway, and Stuart, who, like myself, has followed journalism and literature. It only remains for me to mention the youngest member of the family, John Paul, a bright and affectionate little fellow of thirteen, whose loss in 1868 threw a shadow over the home which only the passage of long years softened.

Newcastle, in those days, was scarcely a third of its present size, and the river Tyne, which is now a mere ditch, hemmed in on either side by great manufactories, shipbuilding yards, and wharves, from its mouth to a point above Newcastle, was then a fair and noble river, which watered green meadows and swept past scenes of rural beauty. The house in which I was born stood in Elswick Row, and in the year of my birth-1842-that terrace of modest houses formed the boundary-line of the town on the west. Beyond it was nothing but fields and open country. There was no High Level Bridge in those days, spanning the river and forming a link in the great iron highway between the English and Scotch capitals; nor had so much as the first stone of the famous Elswick Ordnance and Engineering Works been laid. The future Lord Armstrong, whom I met at dinner not long ago, looking hardly older than when I first saw him, was then a solicitor, whose office stood in Westgate Street, and whose dreams could scarcely have foreshadowed his ultimate destiny. Richard Granger was just completing that great reconstruction of the centre of the town which gave Newcastle so noble and unprovincial an appearance; but the fine streets he had constructed-finer than any others to be found in England at that period-were still untenanted, and it was melancholy in walking along Clayton Street to see nine houses out of ten mere empty shells without doors or windows.

My earliest recollections start out of the void with great distinctness on one particular day. It was my third birthday, and I can still recall vividly the two boys-myself and my brother James-who were playing together in the garden in front of the pleasant house we then occupied in Summerhill Terrace, when I was called into the drawing-room to receive my birthday gifts.

It is not, however, with the memories of a child that I wish to entertain my readers, except in so far as they may have some intrinsic interest of their own. Dimly I can recall the year of storm and stress on the Continent, when thrones were toppling and the tide of revolution threatened a general catastrophe; vaguely, too, I remember the firing of the guns from the old castle, which announced the death of Queen Adelaide in 1849; but it was not until 1850 that my real life may be said to have begun. In the spring of that year I went on a long visit to my paternal grandfather at St. Andrews, where his family had been settled for many generations. In the station of Berwick-upon-Tweed the luggage of passengers was examined in order to see that whiskey was not being smuggled across the Border, and I was filled with childish wonder as I watched the process.

St. Andrews, as it was in 1850, bore little resemblance to the well-known pleasure resort of to-day. So far as I can remember, there was not a modern building in the city, and as a picture of an old-world Scottish town it was without a flaw. No club-house faced the sea, nor were there the fashionable residences which adorn the modern St. Andrews. The grass grew and the oats ripened where now stretch the long terraces devoted to summer lodgings for the visitors. North Street and South Street were the two city thoroughfares, if thoroughfares they could be called, seeing that even in them the green weeds grew freely. Antiquity and repose characterised the place as a whole, though in the winter months the stir of young life filled the little city, troops of red-cloaked students passing to and fro between the grey, weather-beaten halls of the University and their lodgings. At the end of South Street stood the ruins of the cathedral with the fine tower, in which the beams of some great vessel of the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the neighbouring Bell Rock, were carefully preserved, and the graceful arches of the sacred building, for the destruction of which John Knox was responsible. Many generations of my forefathers slept side by side in one particular portion of the cathedral grounds, and here my grandfather used to bring me to play among the tombs and to spell out the names of kinsmen who had died a century or more before my own earthly pilgrimage began. The whole place, with its noble ruins of castle and cathedral, its grey and empty streets, its venerable halls, its green links and fine coast-line, made a profound impression upon my imagination as a child. To this day I can recall not only the scene itself, but the sounds, the colours, the briny odours, the very atmosphere of the place.

Golf was then, as now, the one great amusement of the citizens, though there was this difference between the past and the present. In those days the game was almost unknown to the rest of the world, and to all intents and purposes St. Andrews had a monopoly of it. [Footnote: Blackheath, of course, had then, as now, its ancient golf club.] We all talked golf, even if we did not all play it. The shop-boys rose betimes of a summer's morning to enjoy a round on the links before breakfast, and learned professors and staid ministers gave their afternoons to the same absorbing pursuit. Child though I was, even I had my clubs, and played in my own fashion at the game.

My grandfather, who had retired from his business as a manufacturer of flax some years before, had a number of poor relations and dependents whom he frequently visited, taking me with him as a companion. Many of these were weavers, and in those days the weaver carried on his craft at home. I can see distinctly the little stone cottages in the narrow wynds off South Street, which I was wont to visit; I can recall the whirr and rattle of the loom "ben the house," and picture to myself the grave elderly man who on my entrance would rise from the rickety machine in front of which he was seated, and, after refreshing himself with a pinch of snuff, adjust his horn-rimmed spectacles and stare, with a seriousness which to me was somewhat disquieting, at the little English boy who had found his way into his presence. Kind they were without exception, these simple homely folk; but their gravity was hardly to be measured. Stern Calvinists to a man and a woman, the world was clearly to them no playground, no place for the frivolous pursuit of pleasure; and even the innocent sports of a child seemed to jar on their sense of the fitness of things.

It was on Sunday, however, that the full severity of the Scotch Puritanism of that day made itself felt in my inmost soul. Oh, the dreary monotony of those Sabbaths at St. Andrews! The long, long service and yet longer sermon in the forenoon, the funereal procession of the congregation to their homes, the hasty meal, consisting chiefly of tea and cold, hard-boiled eggs, which took the place of dinner, and the return within a few minutes to the kirk, where the vitiated atmosphere left by the morning congregation had not yet passed away. Even when the second service had come to a close, the solemnities of the day were not ended, for the Sunday School met in the late afternoon, and remained in session for a couple of hours. But it was not the public services, terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal-perhaps one might say more advanced-than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round the blinds were closely drawn, lest the rays of the sun should dissipate the gloom befitting the solemn day, whilst no voice in the household was raised above a sepulchral whisper. Lucky for me was it that I was sent to bed early, and that thus the horrors of the Sabbath were in my case abbreviated. The older members of the family sat in a silent semicircle round the smouldering fire, each holding, and some possibly reading, a book, the suitableness of which for use at such a time was beyond question. The Bible, the metrical version of the Psalms, and one or two volumes of discourses by divines of undoubted orthodoxy, formed the only literature recognised on these occasions. For myself, I had brought with me from home a copy of the delightful, though now forgotten, book called "Evenings at Home." and my Sabbatical sufferings were intensified by the sight of this volume on a high bookshelf, where it remained beyond my reach from Saturday night till Monday morning.

My life among these grave, elderly men and women would probably have been a sad one but for one fact. Adjoining my grandfather's residence was a small printing office, which he had established some years before for the benefit of a widowed daughter-in-law. A door opened from the house into the printing office, and through it I would steal whenever I got the chance. It was not only that the journeyman printer (there were journeymen in those days) was the kindest of men, whose memory I cherish with affection to this hour, and who never failed to welcome me with a smile and a pleasant word when I invaded his domain. The place had a charm of its own for me, mysterious, inexplicable, but absolutely enthralling. The cases of type, the presses, the ink-rollers, the damp proof-sheets-chiefly of bills announcing public meetings or the "roup" of some bankrupt farmer's stock-filled me with wonder and delight. Child as I was, I saw in these humble implements of the petty tradesman the means by which one mind can place itself in contact with many.

It is not to be supposed that I had even the dimmest perception of anything beyond the most obvious features of the printer's business, but the seed was sown then which was to fructify throughout my whole remaining life, and from the day when I first felt the fascination of that humble printer's workshop, I never ceased to regard myself as in a special degree a child of the printing-press. How delightful were the hours which I and David, the journeyman aforesaid, spent together when business was slack-and it was often slack! Then it was that together we would compose the most wonderful announcements of the great enterprises to which I was to commit myself in after life. Now it was the prospectus of a "genteel academy" of which I was to be the principal, and again it was the announcement of the opening of a vast emporium for the sale of goods of every description under my direction, that we thus composed and printed. These advertisements were invariably printed on gilt-edged paper in the bluest of ink, and, when I subsequently returned home, excited prodigious envy in my elder brother, who had never been privileged to "see himself in print."

My stay at St. Andrews ended at last in a somewhat melancholy fashion. As the place seemed to agree with me, it was settled that I should remain for a year at least; and in order that the time might not be wasted I was sent to school, the school being the well-known Madras College. Here both boys and girls were taught together. Of the present state of that famous institution I know nothing, nor do I wish to utter a word of disparagement of those who were responsible for its management fifty years ago; but to me, a timid boy who, in spite of his Northumbrian burr, was turned to ridicule as a Cockney by the Fifeshire lads and lasses, it wore the aspect of a veritable place of torment. That classic instrument of discipline, the tawse, was in use at every hour of the day, girls as well as boys receiving barbarous punishment under the eyes of their class-mates. Perhaps the cruelty was not so great as it seemed to me, but at all events it was enough, so far as I was concerned. My dread of the terrible lash grew into a brooding horror, which poisoned my days and destroyed my nights; and before I had been a month at the school I was seized with an attack upon the brain which nearly proved fatal.

Let me mention here, by way of testifying to the orthodoxy of the religious training given to my young soul, that on the first night on which I became delirious I was pursued by a phantom, plainly visible to my overwrought imagination, which wore the exact guise of the Evil One. Horns, hoofs, tail, and trident, were all clearly seen, and I sprang wildly from side to side of my bed trying to evade the fiend's attempt to capture me, until at last I took refuge, trembling and almost fainting, in my grandfather's arms. My youth and my good constitution carried me safely through an illness of no ordinary severity, and one day, as I lay in bed in the first stage of convalescence, I had the joy of hearing my mother's voice, and of knowing that she was with me once more. A few days later I returned with her to Newcastle, and thus ended the attempt to make a Scotsman of me.

My visit to the North, however, had the effect of stimulating my intelligence, and giving me a real interest in things around me. Travel had, in short, done its usual work of instructing and vivifying the mind. Henceforward I had a standard of comparison to apply to home scenes and experiences which I had not previously possessed. One favourite resort of ours at home was a grove of trees situate midway between the outskirts of the town and the village of Benwell. To us children, and to certain other young folk who were our playmates, it was known as Diana's Grove, though whether the name came from some fancy of our own or some bygone tradition, I was never able to ascertain. On the maps of those days it bore quite another designation. It was a delightful spot, and when, accompanied by our nursemaid, my brothers and I set off to spend a long summer morning there, we seemed to have reached the height of bliss. The grove was separated from Elswick Lane by sloping fields, where wheat and barley grew luxuriantly, and the narrow path by which we ran, shouting with joy, through these fields to our haven among the trees led past a little fountain at which we always stopped to drink. The grove itself was a small wood of oak and fir trees, covering a piece of rising ground from which the most delightful views of the beautiful Tyne Valley and the country lying south of the river were to be obtained. How often as a child, when tired with my boyish games, I have sat with my brother beneath one of the trees of the grove, and looked with eyes of wonder on the scene before me! The noble river seemed to flow almost at our feet, and the only signs of life upon its surface were the great keels passing slowly up and down. Beyond it were the green meadows of Dunstan, whilst, rising behind them, was the fine amphitheatre crowned by the pretty village of Wickham and the woods of Ravensworth and Gibside. Young as I was, I could quote poetry; and I remember how, as I looked upon this scene, there invariably occurred to me the lines-

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood

Stand dressed in living green;

So to the Jews old Canaan stood

While Jordan rolled between."

Away yonder, across the brimming river, was the Canaan of my imagination-the mysterious, unknown land into which my little feet were so eager to wander, reckless of what might happen there. Why do I dwell upon this simple scene? I do so because, alas, it is now a scene of the past. Where my young comrades and I made merry fifty years ago in the shade of the oak trees, or beside the well in the meadow, there is now a vast cemetery, and some of those who played with me there now sleep peacefully almost in the shadow of the Diana's Grove we loved so well. And the prospect from the grove-where is it now? Along the north bank of the Tyne, at that very spot, stretch the immense works of Lord Armstrong, whilst the houses of his workmen, in thickly-planted streets, cover the fair meadows of my youth, and the dense cloud of smoke for ever rising from forge and furnace blots out the prospect of the southern shore.

Hardly less melancholy is the change which has overtaken the favourite seaside resorts of my childhood. Tynemouth was the earliest watering-place of which I knew anything. In those days the pleasant village, not yet defiled by the soot of Shields, consisted of three streets, called respectively Front Street, Middle Street, and Back Street. There was no great pier casting its mighty arm into the sea across the mouth of the river, and the favourite resort of visitors, the place where we children played and bathed, and our elders lounged and read or flirted, according to their tastes, was the quaint little haven now given up to the pier works. How high the breakers were that rolled into that haven as I stood, a wondering child, and watched them from the shore! I have tossed on many seas since then, and have stood on many a storm-swept headland; but nowhere have I seen waves so high-so irresistible in their majesty, as those waves at Tynemouth seemed to my innocent eyes to be.

Far greater than the change at Tynemouth is that which has taken place at Whitley, another of our favourite summer resorts, on the delightful Northumbrian coast. What Whitley is now I do not know; but when I last saw it, more than a dozen years ago, it had become a rambling, ugly, ill-built town, chiefly given over to lodging-house keepers, though redeemed by its fine stretch of hard sand. Very different was the Whitley with which I first made acquaintance in 1849. There was no lodging-house in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast of church or chapel, and which had only one small shop. My parents used to hire a charming little cottage belonging to the village blacksmith. Its front opened upon the village street, and behind was a garden, full of the simple cottage flowers which are so strangely unfamiliar to those doomed to dwell in towns. A summer-house, clothed in honeysuckle, was one of the features of the garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet, whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's cottage at Whitley has been vividly brought back to me under rather singular circumstances. In the spring of 1895 I was dining in Downing Street with Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister. Next to me at dinner was seated Sir James Joicey, the millionaire colliery owner and Member of Parliament. Sir James is, like myself, a Northumbrian, and our conversation naturally turned upon our native county. I spoke of the blacksmith's cottage, and the bower of honeysuckle at Whitley, with the enthusiasm which old memories evoked. To my surprise, there was an answering gleam of pleasure and tenderness on my friend's face. "You lived in the blacksmith's cottage?" said he. "Why, so did we when I was a boy!" We found, on comparing dates, that the Joiceys had followed my own parents as tenants of the tiny house when the latter gave it up. To both of us it seemed a far cry from the honest blacksmith's modest cottage to Mr. Pitt's dining-room in Downing Street.]

It was in the autumn of 1850 that a rather curious adventure befell me, which might well have cut short my career, and prevented these pages from ever seeing the light. We were about to remove from Summerhill Terrace to a house not far distant which had just been bought by my father, and, as it happened, one dull afternoon I was left alone at home, my mother and the servants being all engaged at the new house. I was left with strict injunctions to "put the chain on the front door," and to bolt the kitchen door, which was on a lower level than the other. The first order I obeyed, but the second, under the temptation of an entrancing story in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine which absorbed my thoughts, I entirely forgot. I was devouring this story, as only children do devour stories, when I heard the front door opened. I was sitting in the parlour, at the back of the house, so that I could not see anyone enter the garden. Running to the door, under the belief that my mother had returned, I found myself confronted by two men. They were-or pretended to be-pedlars; and one of them carried a case filled with sham jewellery. Their great desire seemed to be to get me to unchain the door. I was simple enough to tell them that I was alone in the house, but my simplicity did not carry me so far as a compliance with their urgent request. After arguing with me for several minutes, and even endeavouring to bribe me with a trumpery jewel, the men withdrew, muttering. I watched them for a moment, and took note of the keen, earnest gaze they bent upon the house before leaving the garden. But the voice of the charmer in Tait was calling too loudly to allow me to dwell upon anything else, and I was quickly back again in the parlour and deep in mystery.

It might have been twenty minutes later that there fell upon my startled ear a sound which under the circumstances was distinctly sinister-that of a man's foot on the sanded floor of the kitchen passage below. A timid child at all times, there is no need to say that when I crept to the head of the stairs, and, after listening there breathlessly for a few seconds, ascertained beyond doubt that more than one man was moving about in the rooms below me, I was filled with almost a paralysing sense of terror. Here at last the "robbers" of whom I and my brother had so often talked in frightened whispers in our beds, were come in good earnest. What was to be done? And then there flashed upon me, like an inspiration, the recollection of a plan which we had talked over together when discussing the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two friends the pedlars flying through the yard, and pausing not to look behind. I ought, of course, to have forthwith gone downstairs and done my duty by that back door, which I had so shamefully neglected earlier in the day; but I am ashamed to say that my momentary access of courage had entirely died away by this time, and that for no imaginable sum of money would I have dared to descend those stairs, and pass through the dark passage leading to the back door. The thieves were in due time captured and transported for another offence; but my parents refused to prosecute them in order that I might escape the ordeal of a public examination. They were desperate ruffians, and the police declared their belief that if they had known I was alone in the house they would have murdered me.

I now come to my schooldays in the distant years 1852-4. My father, as I have already said, was a minister of religion for fifty years at Newcastle. He was one of the gentlest and noblest of men, one whom I have never ceased to revere as the very pattern and exemplar of a Christian gentleman. But those who follow such a calling cannot expect to gain riches as their reward, and my father was a poor man. Despite his poverty, he was resolved that his sons should have the best education that he could procure for them. That meant that they must be sent to the best school in the town-Percy Street Academy. So when my elder brother in 1848 was of school age, he took him to Mr., not then Dr., Bruce, to enter him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation, knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He told my mother how Mr. Bruce, after examining my brother, had pronounced him to be fully qualified to enter the school; and then my father asked about the fees. The answer he received was, "My dear Mr. Reid, I never take a fee from a minister of religion." And so it came to pass that not only my brother James but myself and my two younger brothers were educated at Percy Street without any fee being paid on our behalf. No one will wonder that I cherish Dr. Bruce's memory with unstinted gratitude and reverence.

Schooldays, despite the popular theory, are, as a matter of fact, generally as uninteresting to the schoolboy as their story is to the public, and I shall not detain the reader with much about this period of my life. Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the father, by the way, of Mr. Justice Bruce, was then and long afterwards the most famous school master in the North of England, and under him I received that small fraction of my education which a man usually obtains during pupilage. Percy Street Academy, Newcastle, has long since disappeared, after having counted no inconsiderable proportion of the best-known residents among its pupils. It occupied a series of rambling buildings with an imposing house at the end of the row, in which lived "The Doctor," the assistant masters, and the boarders. But though the school is gone, my old schoolmaster died but recently, enjoying to the last the respect of his fellow citizens and the repose of a happy old age. He is known to fame as the author of the leading work on the Roman Wall, and as an antiquary of high repute. I have a grateful recollection of many of his acts during my school career; and, looking back, there are none I now esteem more highly than the attempts he constantly made to interest his pupils in the general affairs of the world outside the school-gates.

How well, for example, do I remember the school being summoned one morning in November, 1854, to the large writing room! Here the Doctor was standing at his desk awaiting us, armed with a copy of the Times. It had just arrived, and it contained W. H. Russell's brilliant account of the battle of Inkermann. In a few well-chosen words, the Doctor-who was an excellent public speaker-explained that he had called us from our tasks in order that we might listen to the story of a great deed done for England of which every Englishman ought to be proud; and then he read the whole story of the battle as it is told in Russell's graphic narrative, whilst we boys cheered each deed of English valour and groaned at the Russians as lustily as though we had been ourselves spectators of the fight. It was a wise act on the part of Dr. Bruce, and many others besides myself must have been grateful to him for having thus made us participators in the emotion which in those stirring times thrilled the nation.

It was before the Crimean War, however, that we in Newcastle passed through an experience the like of which I shall hardly encounter again. Newcastle was then notorious for its bad sanitation. A great part of the town consisted of houses of extreme antiquity, crowded together in narrow alleys in the neighbourhood of the river. These alleys, I may note in passing, were known as "chares"-a designation which used habitually to puzzle the Judges of Assize when they had to inquire into the circumstances of one of the not infrequent riots which in those days chequered the harmony of life on the banks of the Tyne. It was towards the end of July, 1853, that the rumour spread, reaching even a schoolboy like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town was preceded by an extraordinary phenomenon which may, or may not, have been connected with the epidemic. One hot morning in August, when I left home for school, I was struck by the curious appearance of the atmosphere. No sooner had I stepped out of doors than I found that the strange dimness which pervaded everything was due to swarms of minute flies, which literally darkened the skies and settled in innumerable hosts upon every object animate and inanimate. It was impossible to breathe without inhaling these loathsome insects whenever the mouth was opened, and in order to protect ourselves my brother and I fastened our pocket handkerchiefs over our faces and walked to school in this fashion. We found that most other persons had adopted the same device. The plague lasted in Egyptian intensity for the whole of that day. The next day it had to a certain extent subsided, and on the third the dead flies might have been seen literally in heaps, each one of which must have contained countless thousands, in the corners of halls and passages. Everybody connected this most disagreeable phenomenon with the approach of the pestilence, and, whether they did so rightly or wrongly, the cholera only too certainly followed upon its heels.

Its first appearance raised feelings of terror in many hearts. I confess for myself that when I heard that three persons had died of cholera in the town on the previous day I fell into a small panic; but it was then that my mother, always a deeply religious woman, seeing how things were going with us, called her children together, and in the happiest manner succeeded in converting our dread of an unknown and mysterious evil into a perfect and childlike trust in the protection of a Heavenly Father. What she said I cannot now recall; I only know that from that moment, whilst many of our companions in school and at play went about with pallid faces and unstrung nerves, all our fears seemed as if by magic to have vanished. But the reality of the plague was terrible indeed, and the month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself came out to smoke his evening pipe, and as usual he had a kindly word for each one of us. We left him, when we went to bed, sauntering in the placid eventide among the flowers he was wont carefully to tend. When I got downstairs next morning a rough country servant, who was then in our employment, bluntly told me that "that laddie B--" (naming our neighbour) had died of the cholera during the night.

It is easy to conceive the effect which an incident like this necessarily had upon the mind of a child; and there were many such incidents. I verily believe that if we had not been clad by our mother's care and wisdom in that armour of trusting faith, we should have suffered irremediable injury. As it was, it became apparent that we must be removed from the plague-stricken town. But whither could we go? No visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an attack of the disease, probably incurred whilst visiting, with quiet but unstinted devotion, the sick, and I also had had a very slight touch of it. The fine air of Whitley and the sunny hours spent on the lonely sands did wonders for us all; and when we returned home it was to find Newcastle restored to its ordinary life, with only the empty places in many households to remind us of the ordeal through which the town had passed.

I have spoken of the resemblance between this outbreak of cholera and the Great Plague of London. Curiously enough, the likeness between the experiences of the northern town in the nineteenth century and the capital in the seventeenth was to be made yet closer. It was just a year after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark October night, I began to dream, and, naturally enough at the time, my dreams were of the war which had then begun. A Russian fleet escaping from the Baltic had sailed up the Tyne and was bombarding Newcastle. So ran my vision, and its effect was heightened by the firing of the guns I heard in my sleep.

Suddenly my dream and everything else vanished from my mind, driven out by a shock the like of which I had never experienced before. I was sitting up in bed, trembling violently, and wondering what awful thing it was that had broken in upon my slumbers. It was a sound-but such a sound! Nothing approaching to it had ever fallen on my ears before; and even when wide awake I still heard its echoes vibrating around me. My brother James, strange to say, had slept peacefully through the roar of an explosion the noise of which was heard at Sunderland, fourteen miles away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight. We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presently our natural agitation was increased by a violent knocking on the front door of the house at that untimely hour. It was the old man who "kept" my father's chapel at Tuthill Stairs, and he brought with him a doleful story. Evidently hysterical from the shock he had received, he told my father, amid his sobs, that half of Newcastle and Gateshead had been blown down by a frightful explosion in one of the Gateshead bonded warehouses; that the dead and dying were lying about in hundreds, and that, to crown everything, Tuthill Stairs Chapel had been destroyed.

It was indeed a tale of woe; and though my father promptly discounted it, it was impossible to doubt, with the evidence of that flaming sky before our eyes, that something very terrible had happened. Whether old Dixon expected my father to act as an amateur fireman, or whether he hoped for services of a more spiritual kind, I do not know; but he resolutely refused to return to the scene of the disaster unless my father accompanied him. So by-and-by my brother and I found ourselves accompanying my father and the chapel-keeper on their way to the fire.

A strange spectacle it was which was presented to us. Thousands of persons were hurrying down towards the river side; and upon their faces shone the reflection of the glowing sky. By-and-by, as we came within range of the effects of the explosion, we found broken windows and shattered doorways on every side. It was not, however, until we reached the High Level Bridge, and from the giddy height of the roadway looked down upon the river and the two towns, that we realised the full extent of the disaster which had happened so suddenly. To our right, as we stood on the bridge, raged a fire of immense extent. The flames were roaring upwards from one of the great bonded warehouses of Gateshead, and threatening at every moment to attack the old parish church, which stood like a rock strangely illumined in the glare; to our left, in the crowded streets and alleys of the lower part of Newcastle, I counted no fewer than seven fires burning fiercely in different places, whilst on the river there were three ships in flames. It was wonderful to look up and see burning sparks and fragments hurtling through air, resembling nothing so much (I thought at the time) as a snowstorm every flake of which was a point of fire; it was wonderful, too, to see the shipping in the river, the broad stream itself, and the long lines of houses on either side glowing in the dancing flames. We could hear the rush of the fire heavenwards; we could see the mere handfuls of men-soldiers, police, and what not-who were vainly striving to cope with the terrible enemy they had so suddenly been called upon to face; and even as we looked we saw fresh fires break out, and above the roar of the mighty furnace on the Gateshead side-with the glowing crater which marked the site of the great explosion-could hear at intervals the cries of the workers. Looking back, I think that was upon the whole the most sublimely impressive sight I ever beheld. The two burning towns; the river between them glittering as though its waters had been turned to gold; the dense silent crowds around me-these made up a picture the memory of which can never fade.

Though old Dixon's "hundreds of dead and dying" was the wildest of exaggerations, there had been a most lamentable loss of life as a consequence of the explosion. What had happened was this: about midnight a fire had broken out in a vinegar manufactory in the densely-crowded district of Gateshead lying between the parish church and the river. This fire, baffling the efforts of the fire brigade, spread quickly, until it reached some large bonded warehouses adjoining the vinegar manufactory. By this time it had acquired such proportions that it had been found necessary to summon the military from the Newcastle Barracks to assist in the effort to extinguish it, whilst vast crowds of people assembled, not only in the neighbourhood of the fire itself, but on the bridges and Newcastle quay, from which an excellent view was to be obtained. The fire at last reached a warehouse owned by a gentleman named Bertram, and here it assumed a new character. The exact contents of the warehouse remain undiscovered to this day. At the time it was freely asserted that Mr. Bertram had, in direct breach of the law, warehoused a large quantity of gunpowder; but scientific witnesses who were subsequently examined showed that it was possible that certain chemicals stored in the warehouse, when suddenly combined, as by the falling of the floors, would be quite as explosive as gunpowder itself.

Be this as it may, after one or two slight explosions-those which in my dream were transformed into the cannonade of a Russian force-the whole warehouse with all its contents was suddenly blown into the air by the force of an explosion seldom equalled in its terrible violence. That explosion not only carried the burning materials across the river to Newcastle, where they quickly produced another conflagration as serious in its character as that which was raging in Gateshead, but inflicted terrible injury both to life and property. The persons in the neighbourhood of the burning building, including soldiers, firemen, police, and Mr. Bertram, the owner of the warehouse, were instantly killed; and in many cases not a trace of their remains could afterwards be found. On the bridges and on Newcastle quay the great crowds of onlookers were thrown to the ground by the shock, and several were killed outright; whilst, far and wide, buildings were partially unroofed, windows broken, and a great and populous district reduced to the state in which one might have expected to see it after a bombardment. The exact number of those killed was never ascertained, but I believe that between thirty and forty persons lost their lives.

As I came away with my father and brother from the scene of the fire, my young nerves received the shock which invariably follows the first sight of death. In the Sandhill-the scene of Lord Eldon's elopement with the beautiful Bessie Surtees-a man was lying on the pavement who had been killed by the force of the explosion. As I passed, they were lifting the body into a cart, and the sight of the head, hanging helplessly like that of a dead bird, was one I never forgot. All that day the fires burned fiercely, and it was not until the third day that they were really subdued. Indeed, on the Gateshead side the ruined warehouses smoked and smouldered for more than a week. In all, the value of the property destroyed was something like a million sterling.

Never shall I forget my morning at school on the day on which the fire first broke out. Boylike, it was the wonder rather than the horror of the thing which was uppermost in my mind, and I and my schoolfellows, before the morning bell sounded, eagerly related to each other all that we had seen; those who, like myself, had been early on the ground having much to tell to eager listeners. It was only when we had trooped excitedly into our class-rooms, and found ourselves face to face with our masters, that we began to realise the actual solemnity of a catastrophe the like of which had never before befallen an English provincial town. In the Latin room, where I was due at the opening of the school, I was unfeignedly surprised to see Mr. Garven, our old classical tutor, sitting in tears at his desk, and I can still hear the broken whispers in which he attempted to speak to us of the terrible event.

It came home, I ought to say, very closely to "Bruce's school." More than one of those killed had been pupils, and the son of Mr. Bertram, upon whom already an excited public opinion was seeking to fasten the responsibility for the explosion, was one of our schoolfellows, and had but the day before joined us in our lessons. Suddenly as, in a half-hearted way, we began our usual tasks, Dr. Bruce entered, pale and agitated. "Boys," he said, "a dreadful thing has happened to our good old town. God knows how far the mischief may extend, and what ruin may be wrought; but we know already that more than one old pupil here have lost their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent--" And then the Doctor's voice fairly gave way, and we found ourselves dismissed to an unexpected-and, for once, an undesired-holiday. These things sink deep into the youthful imagination, and the memory of them can never be lost. As I look back upon the years I spent at school, that dark October morning stands out with a prominence that causes every other day of my school life to sink into insignificance.

Aspirations After a Journalistic Life-A Clerk's Stool in the W.B. Lead

Office-Literary Ambitions-An Accepted Contribution-The Northern

Daily Express and its Editor-Founding a Literary Institute-Letters

from Charles Kingsley and Archbishop Longley-Joseph Cowen and his

Revolutionary Friends-Orsini-Thackeray's Lectures and Dickens's

Readings.

One day, in the summer of 1856, I was walking along Princes Street, Edinburgh, looking with wonder and delight upon the beautiful panorama that was spread before my eyes. I was little for my age, and the gentleman who was my companion, and who was pointing out to me the many famous buildings and monuments that form the glory of the modern Athens, was leading me by the hand.

Probably he thought me still younger than I was, and treated me as a mere child. I had come to Edinburgh on a brief holiday, and was staying at the house of one of my father's friends. By-and-by, having duly fulfilled his duty as showman, my companion, in a kindly, patronising way, sought to draw me out. "And what do you mean to be, my boy, when you grow up?" he asked. My answer was instantaneous and assured. "I mean to be a newspaper editor, sir." My friend flung my hand from him and burst into a roar of laughter, which surprised me even more than it did the passers-by. "A newspaper editor!" he cried, still convulsed by what appeared to me a most unseemly, if not offensive, merriment. "Good heavens! And what in the world has put such a thing as that into the child's head?" My wounded dignity came to my aid. Was I not fourteen? and had I not already left school and begun to earn my own living? "I made up my mind a long time ago," I said in the accents of injured innocence. "When I am a man I mean to be that, and nothing else." I had a sad time of it for the rest of the day, for this worthy gentleman appreciated what he regarded as the joke so keenly that whenever he met a friend he stopped him, and said, "Let me introduce to you a live editor-that is to be some day." He enjoyed the situation more than I did.

But it was quite true. Young as I was, I had made up my mind, and was resolved that nothing should move me from my purpose. Perhaps the printer's ink of the dear old composing room at St. Andrews had inoculated me, and made me proof against the usual temptations by which a boy, dreaming of his future path in life, is beset. Or perhaps it was because printer's ink is in the blood of the family. Whatever may have been the cause, journalism was my first precocious love, and my last; and, looking back across the years of heavy work which now separate me from that June morning at Edinburgh, I see no reason to repent my early choice or the loss of every other chance of success in life.

Yet, at the outset, there were a hundred obstacles barring my way to the door through which I longed to pass. I was already, as I have said, at work. Knowing full well the narrowness of my father's means, I had cheerfully taken a situation as a clerk, and kindly Fortune had smiled upon me in the appointment I secured. Most boys of my time on leaving school went, as it was phrased in those days, "on the quay side" at Newcastle; that is to say, they entered the office of one of the great merchants by whose hands the prosperous trade of the Tyne was carried on. Here their lives were full from morning to night with the business which in such a hive of industry seemed to know no slackening. No doubt, a position in a shipping or colliery office at Newcastle in those days was one to which many advantages were attached. Not a few schoolfellows of my own, starting with no greater advantages than I possessed, have become men of large fortune, have acquired landed estates, have sat in Parliament, have founded county families. But it was not towards these ends that my youthful ambition urged me; and, happily for me, the office to which I went one January morning in the 'fifties, in the humble capacity of junior clerk, had nothing in common with the bustling, worrying places of business on the quay side, where the race for wealth seemed to absorb the thoughts of all, from highest to lowest.

Through the influence of a friend, and chiefly in virtue of my father's name, I secured a place in what was then known as the W.B. Lead Office. There was at that time a certain quality of lead distinguished by these letters which carried off the palm in the lead markets of the world; indeed, its price was constantly from one to two pounds a ton higher than that of any other lead procurable. This lead was obtained from the great mines in Weardale and Allandale, then and for many generations owned by the Beaumont family. Mr. Wentworth Blackett Beaumont was at that time the head of the family. There was no eager bustle, due to the keenness of business competition, in the quiet rooms of the W.B. Lead Office in Northumberland Street, when I entered it as a boy. The whole of the produce of the mines was sold to half a dozen great London firms, and the sales were made in such large quantities that a score of transactions sufficed for a year's work. How great those transactions were may be gathered from the fact that I sometimes had to make out a single invoice in which the sole item stated represented a sum of ￡40,000.

Very soon I found that my chief duty as junior clerk in this eminently sedate and respectable establishment was to read the Times to my immediate superior. This gentleman I must always remember with a lively sense of gratitude. His name was Fothergill, and, like myself, he had little taste for mere business avocations. He was a student, a lover of literature, a collector of books, and a writer of verse. Fortunate was it for me to meet with such a companion at that stage in my life-the stage when one is most susceptible to outside influences. For five years we sat opposite to each other in the same quiet room, and never once did I hear fall from his lips an unworthy idea or suggestion. He suffered from serious weakness of the eyes, and it was for this reason that so much of my spare time (and it was nearly all spare time there) was devoted to reading aloud to him. He had only a clerk's income, small enough in all conscience, but he never wanted money to spend on a book or a magazine. I remember his delight when the first number of the Saturday Review, to which he had subscribed on its appearance, was placed in his hands. From that time forward my daily readings of the leaders in the Times were varied by weekly readings of the brilliant sarcasm and invective which then distinguished the new review that had entered the field of journalism with so bold a mien, and was holding its own so fearlessly against all comers. With such a friend, always ready to give me of his best-alas, at the time, in my youthful ignorance of men, I failed altogether to appreciate my good fortune in meeting a companion like this-my mind rapidly expanded, and before I was half way through my teens I was learning to put boyish things behind me. Although Fothergill did not encourage my precocious affection for the press, wisely holding that a literary life was one reserved only for the few, and, like matrimony, not to be "taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly," he did not, as so many men in his place might have done, stamp ruthlessly upon my aspirations or subject them to that cruel sarcasm which is so killing to the ambitions of the young. This, it is true, was done by another person in the same office-the manager; but, fortunately, that gentleman was altogether so obnoxious to me for many reasons that his special dislike of my literary bent, and the sneers with which he greeted my early appearances in print, did not affect my purpose in the slightest degree.

I could say much of those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged soul! The glory of Milton itself seemed hardly beyond attainment, and I nursed the illusion that within me lay the potentiality of a new Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Happy, foolish dreams, from cherishing which no man has ever been the worse! A hundred times I essayed to produce something worthy of being printed. But the stories, the essays, and-save the mark!-the poems I attempted had a knack of remaining unfinished, or, when finished, were so obviously bad, even to my untrained judgment, that they were promptly destroyed. When at last I did taste the fearful joys of a first appearance in print, it was on a very humble stage. A great controversy was raging in Newcastle in 1857 over the appointment of the then vicar to another living in the town; an appointment that was obnoxious not only because it was a clear case of pluralism, but because the vicar himself belonged to the then unpopular High Church party. I read the articles in the papers, and the letters in which my indignant fellow-townsmen gave expression to their views, with keen interest, and at last I was myself prompted to join in the fray. Having carefully composed a letter to the editor of the Northern Daily Express, which I signed "A Bedesman," I furtively dropped it into the letter-box at the newspaper office, and tremblingly awaited the result.

I had not long to wait. The next morning, as I was on my way to the office, I chanced upon a contents bill of the Express, and there, with dazzled eyes, the testimony of which I could hardly believe, I read the announcement that the paper of the day contained a letter by "A Bedesman." And here I must make a humiliating confession. The price of the paper was a penny, and at that particular moment I discovered that I had not a penny in the world. My weekly pocket-money was sixpence, and it generally went at one of the old bookstalls in the market before the week was far advanced. But I could not face the day before me with the dreadful uncertainty weighing upon my soul as to whether another person might not have adopted the same signature as myself, and whether, consequently, I might not be labouring under a fond delusion. I turned and fled home (fortunately I always started for work in good time), and asked my mother to lend me the penny I needed. In a broken whisper I confided to her the fact that I believed there was really a letter of mine in that morning's Express. I got my penny, and in a few minutes I was feasting my eyes upon that sight-dearer than any other the world can show to the young literary aspirant-my first printed composition. I had then just entered my fifteenth year.

Not one writer in a thousand has stopped at a first book, and not one newspaper contributor in a million has stopped at a first letter to the editor. Like much better people, I had made the discovery that whilst my opinions regarding the Genius of Shakespeare, the Art of Fiction, and the Character of Cromwell were not wanted by anybody, there were some questions cropping up, as it were, at my own door, about which I might, if I liked, give an opinion that some persons at all events would think worth printing. In short, I was enabled to see that though I could not fly, I might at least walk. How eagerly I turned to profit the discovery I had thus made need not be told here. For the moment my ambitious designs were laid on one side. I no longer dreamed of an Epic that should rival "Paradise Lost" or a novel that might outshine "Vanity Fair"; but I prepared to discuss the local questions of the hour, the site of a post office, the opening of a hospital, the grievance of some small public official, with the zest which I had only felt hitherto when dealing with the great literary and social problems, to the discussion of which my untrained intelligence could contribute nothing of value. What I wrote on such topics as those I have named I cannot pretend to remember; but there must have been some little promise in my contributions to the Express, for one memorable day, when I got home from work, my father told me that he had received a visit from Mr. Marshall, the chief proprietor of that paper, and that this visit closely concerned me. Mr. Marshall had inquired as to my age and occupation, and having suggested that my leaning towards journalism ought not to be repressed, had offered to have me taught shorthand by the reporter of the Express. Finally he had left with my father half a sovereign, which he desired me to accept in payment of my various contributions to the paper. So, whilst I was still a mere boy, not having as yet entered on my sixteenth year, I found myself enrolled among the more or less irregular camp-followers of journalism.

It was indeed a rapturous moment when I heard this news. If I had been allowed, I would forthwith have thrown up my place at the W.B. Lead office and taken service-even the humblest-on the Press. But on this point my father was firm. I must stick to my proper work for the present, though there could be no harm in my devoting my evenings to such study and practice as might fit me for journalism hereafter. Not that he or my mother desired to see me become a journalist. The Press-at all events in provincial towns-in those days was the reverse of respectable in the eyes of the world; and truly there was some reason for the low esteem in which it was held. The ordinary reporter on a country paper was generally illiterate, was too often intemperate, and was invariably ill-paid. Again and again did my mother seek to check my eager yearning for a life on the Press with the repetition of dismal stories dinned into her ears by sympathising friends, who deplored the fact that her son should dream of leaving so secure and respectable a position as a clerkship in the W.B. Lead Office for the poor rewards and dubious respectability of a newspaper career.

There was an old friend of my father's-Innes by name-who took it upon himself to remonstrate with me. After exhorting me fervently for some time, he sought to illustrate the dangers of the course on which I was anxious to embark by a personal experience. "Thomas," he said solemnly (and oh, how I hated to be called Thomas!), "I knew a laddie called Forster. His father was a most respectable, decent man, that kept a butcher's shop at the top o' the Side-a first-rate business; and this laddie-his name was John-got just such notions into his head as ye have; he was always reading and writing, and nothing would suit him but to go to college instead of sticking to the shop. And at last he went away to London, and his poor father died, and the business went all to pieces, and I've never heard tell of that laddie from the day he went to London until now. He's died of starvation, most likely, by this time."

"Why, Mr. Innes," I cried, "do you really mean to say that you have never heard of Mr. Forster's books-his Life of Oliver Goldsmith and 'The Arrest of the Five Members'? He's one of our great writers now, and if I could only reach a position like his-" But this prospect was so dazzling that it fairly took my breath away, and I lapsed into silence, delighted to find that my old friend's "awful example" should have been a man in whose footsteps I most ardently desired to tread.

As I have mentioned the opposition which my parents offered to my design to become a journalist, it is only right that I should say that if it had not been for the atmosphere in which I lived at home, the accomplishment of that design would never have become possible. Ours was a home of narrow and stinted means, but of wide and generous sympathies. We children learned from the example of our dear father and mother to look beyond ourselves and our own small interests upon the battle of life as it was being fought in the world at large. If our table was of the plainest, there were always books and newspapers in the house, and they were not there for show. My mother had a genuine taste for literature, and a judgment which, if not infallible, was at least sound. Many a time would we discuss together the books we were reading. They were not, as a rule, hot from the Press; but why should they have been, in the case of a boy with all the literary treasures of the world still untasted? My father leaned, as was natural, to the more serious side of literature; but he had a keen interest in public affairs, and he brought to their study a sagacious and well-informed mind. Whilst the spirit in which both he and my mother viewed life and the problems which it daily presented to them was that of a pure and lofty Puritanism, it was broadened and softened, more particularly in the case of my father, by the gentleness and liberality of their own characters. So it was in an atmosphere of culture and liberal thought that I lived my life in those days both at home and at the W.B. Lead Office.

The Northern Daily Express was a penny newspaper which laid claim to be the first provincial daily published at that price. The claim has, I believe, been disputed by Mr. Justin McCarthy, who claims the honour for a Liverpool journal with which he was himself at one time connected. But whether first or second, it is certain that the Express was very early in the field. It had been started at Darlington in 1855 by a gentleman named Watson. A year later it was transferred to Newcastle, and it was in the Express office that I first became acquainted with actual newspaper work. A very curious place was that office when I first knew it. It consisted simply of two rooms and two cellars in a house in West Clayton Street. One of the rooms was devoted to the compositors who set the little sheet; the other was by day the counting-house and the place where the papers were sold and advertisements received, whilst at night it became the editorial office-the editor, sub-editor, and reporters all working together here at the desks occupied by the clerks during the day. I ought, perhaps, to explain that the staff was not quite so large as my description of it might lead people to suppose. The sub-editor, for instance, doubled his part and acted as reporter also. Still, it was a tight fit in that little room in West Clayton Street when I went there of an evening to write some paragraph or letter for the next morning's paper. In the cellars was the machine on which the Express was printed, and the stock of paper.

In one respect, the Express was better equipped than is many a pretentious journal of to-day. Its editor-Manson by name-was a man of remarkable ability, and his carefully-prepared leading articles were certainly second to none in the newspaper press of his day. This is a strong saying, but my reader will not think it unjustified when he hears that Manson's services had been eagerly sought for by more than one London newspaper, including the Times. He was a man of real genius, but, unfortunately, not without the defects of his qualities. In my young eyes he was a marvel, and almost an idol. To sit beside him, as I sometimes did, whilst he forged the thunderbolts which produced so great an effect upon the opinion of the town, was to me a joy almost too great for words. I would sit and watch the untiring hand moving across the slips of blue paper with a mind filled with the awe and reverence with which a pupil of Michael Angelo might have watched the master at work. I had at last got my foot on the first rung of the ladder, and my soul was filled with absolute content. True, my days were given to the W.B. Lead Office; but seldom did an evening come round without finding me, on one pretext or another, in the house in West Clayton Street. Indeed, I had now become almost a recognised member of the staff, and my little contributions in the shape of paragraphs, letters, and the inevitable verses appeared almost daily.

I had been trying to teach myself shorthand, and had made some progress with Pitman's system of phonography; but now, thanks to the kindness of Mr. Marshall, I secured the services of a first-rate teacher, and soon made rapid progress in that difficult art. My teacher was Mr. Lowes, an admirable shorthand writer, who wrote a system of his own. To Mr. Lowes, phonography appeared to be the chief evil afflicting mankind. What little things divide the world! In my teacher's opinion it was divided into phonographers and stenographers, and never did the schoolmen of old show more bitterness in maintaining their own shibboleths than did Lowes in asserting the superiority of his system to that of Mr. Pitman-an opinion which I need scarcely say was not shared by the world.

Lowes was a good fellow, and a most kind and patient teacher. Under his guidance I soon acquired a certain amount of facility in ordinary press-work. Contributions to Chambers's Journal, the Leisure Hour, and one or two minor religious magazines, gave me as the years passed an opportunity of addressing a wider audience than the readers of the Express, and though I had as many misfortunes and disappointments as most young writers, I stuck steadily to my task, and bit by bit strengthened my position in the world of journalism.

There were other fields of activity, besides the press, that I assiduously cultivated. For example, in the plenitude of my wisdom, at the age of seventeen I founded an institution in the west end of Newcastle, not far from my father's church. I called it the "West End Literary Institute," and truly it was designed upon a most ambitious scale. When I recall the way in which I begged money from all and sundry among my friends for the purpose of starting the institute, and the manner in which I pestered distinguished authors for presentation copies of their books, in order to furnish the shelves of the library, I am driven to the painful conclusion that I must have been a terrible person in the days of my youth, and something of a prig to boot. Apropos of the begging for books as free gifts from authors, I had one or two amusing experiences. Among those whom I importuned in this impertinent way were Charles Kingsley, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Longley. Kingsley replied to my request in a manner that was as sensible as it was severe, bluntly telling me that he was a poor man who wrote books in order to get money, and who could not afford to give them away. I have written books myself since then, and have had many an application as unreasonable as that which I addressed to the author of "Alton Locke." This fact, perhaps, explains my entire approval of the snubbing which that distinguished man administered to me.

Very different, however, was the response of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a courteous and dignified epistle, expressing his pleasure at being able to comply with my request, and fifteen handsome octavo volumes of sermons were forthwith forwarded to me from Hatchard's. I had other similar experiences, and the result was that when my library was thrown open to the public the amount of theology which it contained far outweighed every other department of literature. However, people came to my reading-room, and I was fortunately able to provide them with other entertainment besides the reading of old sermons. I started a course of lectures and readings. I blush to say that I distinguished myself one evening by reading the play of Macbeth to an unhappy audience of bored victims. Heaven forgive me! I carried on my West End Institute for some years, started a flourishing penny bank in connection with it, and formed numerous acquaintances among the more intelligent artisans of the district; but at last the building was wanted for an extension of the Sunday schools connected with my father's congregation, and the little performance came to an end. I trust it had not made me an incurable prig, but I fear that it did not do anybody very much good; though, perhaps, it kept some out of mischief.

No account of Newcastle at this period (1850-60) would be complete without some reference to one of its most notable inhabitants, Mr. Joseph Cowen, commonly known at that time to his fellow-townsmen as "Joe." Mr. Cowen's subsequent career in Parliament, brief though it was, gained for him a reputation for eloquence hardly inferior to that enjoyed by the most illustrious of his contemporaries. But in those early days of my youth it was not his eloquence but his advanced opinions about which his fellow-townsmen thought most. He openly professed to be a Republican, in theory at all events, and all his sympathies were engaged on the side of the oppressed nationalities of Europe. A man of culture, of commanding abilities, and of considerable wealth, he lived by choice in the plainest fashion, delighting to be known as one of the people. He dressed at all times in the kind of suit which a Northumbrian pitman wears when not actually at work. Years afterwards, when he had just thrilled all England by a great speech in the House of Commons on the subject of Russian oppression, I chanced to meet him one day in Pall Mall, and, stopping to talk to him, was amused to see the glances of curiosity which were cast at the strangely attired man who had found his way to that fashionable thoroughfare.

Nor was it only in his dress that he affected a likeness to the working-men of Tyneside. In his speech he exaggerated the burr of the Newcastle tongue. Most of us were anxious to get rid of that undesirable distinction. Mr. Cowen clung to it as one of the most precious of his possessions. He had to pay for this piece of affectation in later life, when he became a figure in the House of Commons. His first notable speech in that assembly was on the Royal Titles Bill of Mr. Disraeli. It was a very brilliant performance, greatly admired by those who were able to appreciate it. But, unfortunately, it was not understood by everybody. The day after it was delivered, Mr. Disraeli was questioned at a dinner-party by a lady, who asked him what he thought of the new orator whose presence had been revealed to the House. "I'm sorry I can't answer your question," said the Prime Minister. "It is true that a gentleman, whom I had never seen before, got up on the Opposition side and made a speech which seemed to excite great enthusiasm in a certain part of the House; but, unfortunately, he spoke in a language I had never heard, and I haven't the slightest idea in the world what he said."

But in the days of which I am now writing Mr. Cowen was still a long way from the House of Commons. His fame, however, was even then of no common kind. He was known throughout Europe as a man willing to befriend, not merely with speech and pen, but with purse, every victim of political oppression. By the despotic Governments of the Continent he was held in feverish hatred, and at one time his modest house at Blaydon Burn was regularly watched by French, Russian, and Austrian spies; nor was it without good reason that the tyrants of Europe saw in him their natural enemy. Under his roof many of the most eminent refugees from the countries I have named and from Italy found a welcome shelter, and in one room in that house was a small printing press on which thousands of revolutionary proclamations in all the languages of Europe had been printed. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Felice Orsini, and scores of other notable revolutionaries whose names I forget, were his friends and guests, and through his influence a large party of us in Newcastle were led to take almost as warm an interest in political affairs on the Continent as in the movements of parties at home. Again and again in those days, when France was crushed under the heel of the Second Empire, when Poland was vainly writhing in her cruel bonds, when Hungary was filled with the spirit of rebellion, and when the people of Italy were taking their first steps by the intricate paths of conspiracy and insurrection towards unity and freedom, Joe Cowen would find some excuse for summoning a public meeting in the old Lecture Room, Nelson Street, in order that we might listen to some patriot exile as he told the story of his country's wrongs, or give expression to our own detestation of the despotism which at that time weighed upon Europe, from the banks of the Seine to those of the Volga.

No impressionable youth could fail to be affected by such an influence as this, and if in those days I shrank from Mr. Cowen's views on home politics as being too advanced, I was one of the most enthusiastic of his adherents in his self-appointed mission against the tyrannies of the Continent. How well do I remember some of the faces and figures of Mr. Cowen's friends and guests! I can still see Kossuth with his grey hair and wrinkled brow, and Mazzini with his melancholy eyes and handsome face; I can still hear the tones of Louis Blanc as he stands on the platform of the lecture room and talks to us in excellent English of the epoch of the Great Revolution. But the one man whose face and figure dwell most vividly in my recollection is Orsini, the great Italian who, after a lifetime spent in the attempt to deliver Tuscany and Lombardy from the yoke of the tyrant, died under the guillotine in Paris, and by his death secured for Italy her long-sought freedom. Orsini came to Newcastle shortly after his escape from an Austrian dungeon at Mantua, and addressed a great meeting in the Lecture Room. He spoke English fairly well; but it was the appearance of the man, and the knowledge of all that he had suffered in the struggle for Italian freedom, that appealed to one more eloquently than his words. Never had I seen any man whose appearance equalled that of this Italian martyr who died as an assassin. His features were almost faultless, whilst his jet-black hair set off the lustrous pallor of his complexion with extraordinary effectiveness. Attired in fashionable evening dress, his hands encased in white kid gloves, and a smile, gentle rather than pathetic, lighting up his beautiful face, he looked the last man in the world whom one would naturally associate with desperate deeds. Yet, not many weeks after I had grasped his hand, he had brought about the terrible attempt upon the life of the Emperor Napoleon, when the latter was driving through the Rue Lepelletier, Paris, by which many innocent persons perished, and was himself lying in prison under sentence of death. Mr. Cowen once told me that it was he who provided the funds for carrying out Orsini's plot against Louis Napoleon's life, but he did so in absolute ignorance of the fact that this was the purpose to which the money was to be appropriated. He understood that it was wanted for the equipment of another insurrectionary expedition against the Austrians in Italy, and he willingly subscribed the amount asked for.

As for Orsini, he met his death like a hero; but it is well known that before dying he succeeded, as a leading member of the Carbonari, in extracting from the French Emperor, who had himself belonged to that society, a promise that he would free Italy from Austrian oppression. By giving that promise, Louis Napoleon was delivered from the fear of violent death at the hands of the Carbonari, whilst his fulfilment of it in the war of 1859 gave Italy her first great step towards unity and freedom. Even the romantic page of history has never recorded a more notable transaction than that which thus took place in a condemned cell between an assassin lying under sentence of death and a reigning Emperor; nor would it be possible to denounce regicide so absolutely as most of us do if there were many instances in which it had proved so successful as it did in the case of Orsini.

I have dwelt at undue length on an episode which my readers probably think altogether outside the scope of this narrative, but it does not lie quite so far apart from it as they may imagine. It was my association as a boy with Mr. Cowen's enthusiastic assertion of the rights of oppressed nationalities, and the stirring of my spirit which necessarily resulted from contact, however slight, with men like Kossuth and Orsini, that first made me a real Liberal in politics.

As I have mentioned the Lecture Room-a dismal, stuffy, ill-lighted little theatre-I may refer to two meetings unconnected with foreign politics which I remember in it. One was in 1857, when the Dissenters of Newcastle had revolted against the domination of the Whig clique, and at the general election had set up a candidate of their own. They had great difficulty in finding one, for they required a man who would pay his own expenses (in those days a very serious item), and the chance of success was by no means brilliant. At last, however, they secured a rich retired Bombay merchant, and he came down to Newcastle forthwith to address his first meeting. The Lecture Room was crowded with enthusiastic Nonconformists, and these were the words with which the unhappy candidate began his speech: "Gentlemen, four-and-twenty hours ago, if anybody had asked me where Newcastle-on-Tyne was, I could not have told them." This, to an audience full of the local pride which possessed the soul of every genuine Newcastle man! I need hardly say that, having ascertained where Newcastle was, Mr. C. speedily departed from it, amid a storm of indignation, never again to be seen in its streets.

More vivid still is my recollection of the Lecture Room on the occasion when Thackeray delivered his lectures on the Four Georges to an audience more select than numerous. I was at the age when, as the author of "Vanity Fair" himself has said, "to behold Brown, the author of the last romance, in the flesh, is a joy and a delight." Anybody who had written a book seemed to me to be a hero; what was it then to see and to hear the literary idol of my youth? Thackeray, with his tall figure, his silvery hair, his upturned face, expressive and striking, though by no means beautiful, seemed to me as I sat on my bench and listened to him to be nothing less than one of the gods. He was an admirable lecturer; his voice was musical and clear, his pronunciation singularly distinct and accurate, and the little touches of sarcasm and humour which he conveyed to his audience by a tone or an inflection, quite inimitable. I heard, as I sat listening to his lecture on George the Third-by far the best of the series-someone near me yawn, and my soul was filled with horror at what I thought nothing less than an act of sacrilege. I never saw the great novelist except on the occasion of his visit to Newcastle, but to the end of my days it will be a delight thus to have beheld him in the flesh. Dickens I heard read several times, though never in the Lecture Room; yet I cannot say that any of his readings made upon me the impression produced by Thackeray's lectures. The actor and the arts of the popular entertainer were too plainly visible in all that he did, and I received something like a shock when, having written an enthusiastic but juvenile panegyric upon him on the occasion of one of his visits to Newcastle, I learned that he had sent his secretary to buy a dozen copies of the paper to send to his friends. That so great a man should have thought a mere newspaper effusion worth noticing seemed to me altogether incredible. The reader may smile at the confession, but I own I never thought quite so much of Dickens, as a man, after this incident. This only shows how high was the pedestal upon which I had placed him, and how slight was my knowledge of human nature.

On the Staff of the Newcastle Journal-In a Dilemma-Lord John

Russell and Mr. Gladstone at Newcastle-upon-Tyne-Mr. Gladstone's

Triumphal Progress-A Memorable Colliery Disaster-A Pit-Sinker's

Heroism-Adventure at a Dickens Reading.

At last my term of probation came to an end. My friend and teacher, Mr. Lowes, after a temporary absence from Newcastle, had returned to it to undertake the editorship of the Newcastle Journal, a weekly Tory newspaper which was about to appear in a daily edition. We had kept up our friendship, and to my intense delight he offered me the post of chief reporter on the daily paper. This was in the spring of 1861. My father had come, reluctantly enough, to the conclusion that I must be allowed to go my own way, and accordingly, on July 1st in that year, I entered on my career as a professional journalist. On the previous day I had said good-bye to the W.B. Lead Office, and to Mr. Fothergill, whose kindly interest in my fortunes had never wavered, and whose own literary tastes and sympathies led him at last to look with something like approval on the step I was taking. Never was a young subaltern prouder of his first commission than was I of an appointment which gave me a recognised standing, however humble, on the English Press.

Nor was I without substantial reason for my delight at the change in my lot. My work at the W.B. Lead Office had been light enough in all conscience; but the drudgery of official routine, the strict keeping of office hours, and the monotony which made one day the counterpart of any other, were no more to my liking than they are to the liking of anyone who is young and high-spirited. All this was now at an end. No special hours had to be kept, and no two days were the same. Instead of the four walls of my office, I now had the whole of the northern counties as my sphere of work. To this hour I remember the delight with which on my second morning at the Journal office I set off, in company with the reporters of the Chronicle and the Express, to report the Quarter Sessions at Hexham. A poor task no doubt it was, but it involved a journey up the beautiful Tyne valley, and a glimpse of the old abbey town; it meant, in short, the change from a life of drudgery to one of adventure, and that morning I felt that I had recovered my lost youth.

But enough of my own feelings. The readiness with which I adapted myself to my new surroundings, the zest with which I entered into the friendships of my new comrades, certainly indicated that I had something, at all events, of the Bohemian in my nature. Of the public events of that year, 1861, there is comparatively little to be said. I remember, indeed, that I happened to be acting for the first time as sub-editor in the temporary absence of my friend, Mr. Lowes, when I received a telegram announcing that the first shot had been fired in the American War. Some two or three months later Newcastle was favoured with a visit from Lord John Russell, who had recently accepted an earldom. He was entertained at a great banquet in the Town Hall, whereat all the Whig notabilities of the North of England assembled to do him honour. Now, in my days, provincial reporters were an unsophisticated race. To a young journalist, living in Newcastle, the journalism of London seemed so remote and unattainable that it might as well have been in another planet. The sight of a reporter for one of the London dailies was awe-inspiring, and the notion of being called upon to work in the company of so august a being almost took one's breath away.

It fell out that at the Russell banquet it was arranged that his speech should be reported in short "turns" by the whole body of reporters present. This is an arrangement now, I believe, in universal use, the object being to get the report out quickly. But in 1861 it was almost unknown on the provincial press, and this was my first experience of it. Perhaps I was unnerved by the presence of a couple of Times reporters, or perhaps my knowledge of shorthand was not then all that it should have been. Be this as it may, I have to confess with regret that in reporting my turn of the great statesman's speech I made one woeful blunder. Lord Russell said (I quote from memory) that we saw now in the New World that which had so often been seen in the Old-a struggle on the one side for empire and on the other for independence. Now in the system of shorthand which I had learned, the word "independence" is represented by an arbitrary symbol, consisting of two dots, one above the other, like a colon. When I came to write out my turn, I found to my horror that the signification of this particular symbol had escaped my memory. There it was, staring me in the face from my note-book, but what it meant for my very life I could not at the moment tell. And the telegraph messengers were pestering me for my copy, and, worst of all, the reporters from London seemed to my guilty conscience to be eyeing me askance, and wondering what the delay meant. In a desperate moment I made a guess, not at the meaning of my symbol, but at some word which might take its place, and possibly pass unnoticed; so I represented Lord Russell as having said that we saw in the New World, what we had often seen in the old, a struggle on the one side for empire, and on the other for power. If it did not make absolute nonsense of the speaker's words, it certainly robbed them of all their point and meaning, and yet history is based upon blunders like this. And years afterwards I saw in a certain volume this mutilated sentence printed as Lord Russell's judgment upon the causes of the great rebellion. Never did anybody feel more ashamed of himself than I did at that time, and never again was I caught in a similar dilemma.

Newcastle was very fond in those days of entertaining the distinguished stranger. Lord Russell's visit in 1861 had been such a success that twelve months later the Liberals of the town resolved to invite Mr. Gladstone to be their guest. Mr. Gladstone was at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was not very long since he had ceased to be a Conservative; but already he had incurred the suspicions of a section of the Liberal Party, and the old Whigs of Northumberland would have nothing to do with his visit to the Tyne. But Mr. Gladstone did not need the sympathy or countenance of the Brahmins of Liberalism. He came, he was seen, and he conquered. Rarely have I seen anything to compare with the enthusiasm which fired the people of Tyneside during the two days he spent amongst them in October, 1862. I have said elsewhere that this visit was one of the turning-points in Mr. Gladstone's life. He himself practically acknowledged this to me in after-days. It was the first occasion in his career on which he had been brought into close contact with a great industrial community. It was the first time that he was treated as the popular idol by an overwhelming multitude of his fellow men. On the first day of his visit he was entertained at a banquet in the Town Hall, and it was in his speech after dinner that he made one of the notable mistakes of his great career. The Civil War in America, to which Lord Russell had alluded twelve months before, was still raging. I need hardly say that the sympathies of the upper classes were enthusiastically with the South. The names of the public men of eminence who favoured the North might have been counted upon one's fingers. Mr. Gladstone believed in the cause of the Confederates, and in this speech at Newcastle he declared that Jefferson Davis had created not merely an army and a navy, but a nation. The speech caused a great sensation. Naturally enough, it aroused bitter indignation on the other side of the Atlantic, whilst the sympathisers with the North in this country felt deeply aggrieved by it. In subsequent years Mr. Gladstone publicly made amends to the great Republic for his error of judgment, but it was a long time before he was allowed to forget it.

I had no misadventure in reporting this memorable speech. It was the first occasion on which I had ever heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and it is even fresher in my recollection than my last sight of him shortly before his death. I can recall his tall, upright figure, the handsome, open countenance, as mobile as an actor's, the flashing eye that in moments of passion lit up so wonderfully, the crop of waving brown-black hair. I have seldom seen a finer-looking man. I hear once again the beautiful voice, so sonorous, so varied in tone, so emphatic in accent. To the boy of twenty a first sight of this great historic figure was a revelation. He seemed different from everybody else, almost a being from another world. I suppose that my admiration of Mr. Gladstone, which some have considered idolatrous, is to be dated from that hour. Thirty years afterwards I still regarded him as my political leader, and as the chief of men.

On the second day of his visit to Newcastle, Mr. Gladstone, as the guest of the River Tyne Commissioners, steamed down the Tyne from Newcastle to its mouth. His progress was like that of a conqueror returning from the wars. The firing of cannon, the waving of flags, the cheering of thousands, acclaimed his passage down the coaly stream. An immense train of steamers and barges, all gaily decorated, followed in his wake. At different points of the journey his steamer was brought to a standstill, in order that addresses of welcome might be presented to him by different public bodies. He made speeches without end in reply. I think I reported eight of them myself. It was evident that he was deeply impressed by this demonstration, and I have always held that it was on that fateful day in October, 1862, that he discovered that his unpopularity with the upper classes was more than counterbalanced by his hold upon the affections of the people. As we were returning to Newcastle in the evening, I happened to be standing near Mrs. Gladstone, and she entered into conversation with me. It was the first time that I had ever seen her. "I think this has been the happiest day of my life," she said to me, with that exuberant enthusiasm in the cause of her illustrious husband which was one of the sweetest and noblest traits of her character. Exactly twenty years later, on October 8th, 1882, I sat beside Mrs. Gladstone at dinner at Leeds, where the Prime Minister had just been making a series of memorable speeches, and had received a welcome which even surpassed that at Newcastle in 1862. I recalled our meeting on the steamboat twenty years before, and her face kindled with an expression of delight. "Ah," she said, "I shall never forget that day! It was the first time, you know, that he was received as he deserved to be."

My reporting experiences at Newcastle were as varied as those of most journalists. One day I would be listening to a bishop's charge; the next, in some beautiful spot in the valley of the North Tyne, I would be professing to criticise shorthorns at a cattle show, and on the third day it might be my misfortune to have to be present at an execution. Colliery accidents, boat races (for which the Tyne has long been famous), performances at the theatre-all these came within the scope of my duty. It was admirable training, and has turned out many a good journalist. Always to be on the alert, so that no important item of news should be missed by my paper; always to be ready to reel off a column of readable "copy" on any subject whatever; always to be prepared for any duty that might turn up-these were among the necessary qualifications for my post. Then, as the Journal was short-handed, it sometimes fell to my lot to undertake tasks which usually lie outside the reporter's sphere. Sometimes I had to take a turn at sub-editing, and sometimes I had even to write a leader. My first attempt at leader-writing for the Journal was on a momentous occasion-the death of the Prince Consort. This was an event which for a time lightened my duties considerably. All public festivities were suspended; meetings of every kind were put off, and for a space of some weeks the country was spared the infliction of reading reports of speeches.

It was just about a month after the death of the Prince Consort that the most notable incident connected with my career as a reporter at Newcastle occurred. This was the terrible disaster at the Hartley New Pit, a colliery some fifteen miles from Newcastle, near the bleak Northumberland coast. The accident was of a peculiar character, and it excited an extraordinary amount of public interest. Up to that time it had been lawful to work coal mines with a single shaft, so that there was only one possible mode of egress for the men at work in the pit. Hartley was one of these single shaft collieries, and on the morning of Thursday, January 17th, 1862, more than two hundred men and boys were suddenly made prisoners in the workings by the blocking of this shaft. The beam of a pumping engine erected directly over the mouth of the pit broke, and one half of the beam-a piece of metal weighing some fifteen tons-fell down the shaft. It tore down the sides in its descent, and finally lodged at a point above the seam in which the men were working, with an immense mass of débris from the shaft walls piled above it.

The suspense of the relatives of the buried men and boys was terrible, and the whole civilised world seemed to share their emotion. After the accident had occurred, signals had been exchanged between the buried men and those at the surface, but none could tell how long the former might be able to sustain life in the vitiated atmosphere of the mine, when ventilation was no longer possible. I reached Hartley a few hours after the breaking of the beam, and in the hand-to-hand encounter with death at that forlorn and desolate spot I first became acquainted at close quarters with the tragic realities of life. For a full week in that bitter January weather I may be said to have lived on the pit platform. From ten in the morning till long after midnight I remained there, writing hourly despatches for my paper; then I drove to Newcastle, a cold, dark journey of a couple of hours, and scribbled my latest bulletin at the Journal office. This done, I lay down on a pile of newspapers in the rat-haunted office, and snatched a few hours' sleep before returning to the post of duty. But some nights it was impossible to leave the mouth of the pit even for a moment, for none could tell when the captives might be reached; so I sat with the doctors, the mining engineers, and one or two colleagues before the fire which gave us a partial warmth, though it did not shield us from the pitiless winds and the drifting sleet and snow, which often effaced my "copy" more quickly than I wrote it. It was a time of hardship and endurance, not soon to be forgotten; but it was also a time which tested to the full the capacities, both mental and physical, of the journalist, and I at least derived nothing but benefit from that rough experience.

For a full week the work of re-opening the shaft went on by night and day, and there were wives and parents who during all that week hardly left the neighbourhood of the pit for a single hour. The task of re-opening the shaft was one of extreme peril. The men had to be lowered to their work at the end of a rope in which a loop had been made, which was secured round their bodies. The two chief dangers they had to face were the continual falling in of the sides of the shaft and the presence of noxious gases. They never flinched, however, and I witnessed on that dreary pit platform at Hartley that which I have always considered the bravest deed I ever saw. I and a handful of watchers were dozing round the open fire in the early hours of a bitter winter morning, just one week after the accident had happened, when we were suddenly aroused by an urgent signal from the shaft, evidently coming from the men working far below. We thought that the imprisoned miners had been reached, and eagerly we waited till the first messenger was brought to the surface. Alas! when he was raised to the mouth of the shaft we saw that he was one of the sinkers, and was unconscious-apparently, indeed, dead. Whilst the doctor in attendance was seeking to restore him, other men were brought up, nearly all in the same condition, until the whole of the sinkers who had been engaged in their perilous task of mercy were laid in a row, pallid and unconscious, at our feet. The truth was at once apparent. The obstacle which had so long blocked the shaft had at last been removed, but a deadly gas-carbon dioxide-had at once ascended from the long-sealed workings, and we knew that the men we had been trying to save must be beyond the reach of help.

One of the sinkers who lay insensible on the platform was the son of the master-sinker, Coulson by name. I saw Coulson, when he realised what had happened, stoop down and kiss the unconscious lips of his son, and then, without a word or a sign of hesitation, he calmly took his place in the loop, and ordered the attendants to lower him into the pit. None dared say him nay, for there was still a last faint possibility that some one among the imprisoned miners might yet be alive. But it seemed to us on the pit-heap that the brave old man was going to certain death, and we never expected to see him alive again when he vanished from our sight. He did come back alive, however, and brought with him the terrible story of what he had seen. All the two hundred imprisoned colliers were dead. They were found sitting in long rows in the workings adjoining the shaft. Most had their heads buried in their hands, but here and there friends sat with intertwined arms, whilst fathers whose boys were working with them in the pit were in every case found with their lads clasped in their arms. They had all died very peacefully, and certainly not more than forty-eight hours after the closing of the shaft. One of the over-men had kept a diary of events. It told how some had succumbed to the fatal atmosphere before others, and how, in the depths of the mine, a prayer-meeting had been held, and "Brother Tibbs" had "exhorted" his fellow-sufferers. There was something noble in this peaceful ending of a life of toil and danger. It affected the whole country profoundly. It drew from the Queen, who herself had been but a few weeks a widow, a letter of sympathy which touched the heart of the nation. A subscription was raised for the widows and orphans on so liberal a scale that all their wants were more than provided for. I had myself the pleasure of starting a subscription for Coulson and his heroic fellow-workers in the shaft, which realised a handsome sum; and I was present in the Town Hall at Newcastle when they were decorated with the medals they deserved so well.

Incidentally, this great disaster affected my own career. My accounts, written at the pit mouth from day to day, had been widely quoted and read throughout the country, and it was desired that I should reprint them. They were accordingly republished for the benefit of the fund raised for the sinkers, and had a large sale. As my name appeared on the reprint, it gave me a certain passing renown in journalistic circles, and materially aided me in my future professional life.

Charles Dickens, as I have already mentioned, came to Newcastle to read from his works during my reportership on the Journal. I was, of course, an enthusiastic admirer of his, though, as I have said, Thackeray was my chief hero as a novelist. I have already spoken of the boyish eulogium which I wrote upon Dickens in anticipation of his visit.

The evening of his first reading was marked by an incident which nearly cut short my career. The hall where he was to read was full to the door when I arrived. With three ladies-who, like myself, had come too late-I was in danger of being excluded. A form was, however, brought in, and placed directly beneath the platform, so close to it that we had to incline our heads at an uncomfortable angle in order to see the reader's face. Suddenly, before the reading had proceeded very far, the heavy proscenium, which Dickens always carried about with him for the purpose of his readings, fell with a crash over me and the three ladies on the form. We were so near that the top of the proscenium happily fell beyond us, and we escaped with a severe fright. Years afterwards I was amused to read, in one of the published letters of Dickens to his sister-in-law, an account of this accident, in which the novelist told how his gasman had said afterwards: "The master stood it like a brick." But it was not upon the master, but upon me and the three ladies that that terrible proscenium suddenly descended.