g, hard drinking, and cuddy races. The
pay-night was a fortnightly saturnalia, in which the pitman's character
was fully brought out, especially when the "yel" was good. Though
earning much higher wages than the ordinary labouring population of the
upper soil, the latter did not mix nor intermarry with them; so that they
were left to form their own communities, and hence their marked
peculiarities as a class. Indeed, a sort of traditional disrepute seems
long to have clung to the pitmen, arising perhaps from the nature of
their employment, and from the circumstance that the colliers were among
the last classes enfranchised in England, as they were certainly the last
in Scotland, where they continued bondmen down to the end of last
century. The last thirty years, however, have worked a great improvement
in the moral condition of the Northumbrian pitmen; the abolition of the
twelve months' bond to the mine, and the substitution of a month's notice
previous to leaving, having given them greater freedom and opportunity
for obtaining employment; and day-schools and Sunday-schools, together
with the important influences of railways, have brought them fully up to
a level with the other classes of the labouring population.

The coals, when raised from the pits, are emptied into the waggons placed
alongside, from whence they are sent along the rails to the staiths
erected by the river-side, the waggons sometimes descending by their own
gravity along inclined planes, the waggoner standing behind to check the
speed by means of a convoy or wooden brake bearing upon the rims of the
wheels. Arrived at the staiths, the waggons are emptied at once into the
ships waiting alongside for cargo. Any one who has sailed down the Tyne
from Newcastle Bridge cannot but have been struck with the appearance of
the immense staiths, constructed of timber, which are erected at short
distances from each other on both sides of the river.

[Picture: Coal-Staith on the Tyne]

But a great deal of the coal shipped from the Tyne comes from
above-bridge, where sea-going craft cannot reach, and is floated down the
river in "keels," in which the coals are sometimes piled up according to
convenience when large, or, when the coal is small or tender, it is
conveyed in tubs to prevent breakage. These keels are of a very ancient
model,--perhaps the oldest extant in England: they are even said to be of
the same build as those in which the