over the bridge, his figure showing against
the sky, and he pointed suddenly towards the
coffin as it rolled, and cried aloud to the people
below and around:

"THIS IS CHRISTOPHER WANDLESS!"

I saw all this. The dark stone building, and
the high bridge and the coffin wheeled across
it, and the gaunt man who called out the name
of him who lay within it. And this was not
some strange stage play. It was not a picture
from some new Dance of Death. It was not a
dream. It was reality.

I went, then, to the other side of the great
mound on which the crowd was assembled, and
at the foot of it I saw a train of carts of all sorts
and kinds waiting to receive the dead, some
with straw in them to give the corpse a softer
bed. When a coffin was brought down from
the mound and placed in one of the carts, those
who had not been able, for the press upon the
hillock above, to get near and look upon the
dead man's face, would crowd round the cart,
and clamber up upon it, and stand upon the
wheels, and the coffin-lid would be pushed aside,
and all who could get a chance would gaze upon
the sight within it.

And as I looked towards the stone buildingwith
the high structure of beams and wheels above
it, I saw that those wheels were still revolving
slowly, and the ropes again ascending. Again
the dark truck was pushed out upon the wooden
viaduct, and this time it was followed by
another; then, as before, the weird figure of the
man with the long hair and beard was seen upon
the bridge, and again he pointed with his hand
to the coffins, and again he called aloud to the
people:

"These are John Liddcll and Oswald
Gleghorn!"

After I had stood looking up at that terrible
bridge for a time, watching the rolling of the
coffins, and listening to the calling of the names,
I turned about, and saw at a distance a long,
long row of small low—houses a single row some
quarter of a mile or more from end to end.
Towards this row of houses I observed that the
carts were driven as soon as they had received
their terrible burden.

I was half afraid of intruding upon grief
which I had no right to meddle with in going
near that village; but still I followed one of the
carts at a distance, and, when it had at length
reached the farther end of the row of houses and
the coffin had been taken into one of them, I
drew near to the door. A crowd of people was
assembled on the threshold and in the room
within. At the doors of the adjoining houses
stood a few women, some with a strange sullen
look on their faces, and some with a stupid
stunned expression very miserable to see. But
from within the house into which the body had
been carried there came from some person whom
I could not see for the bystanders, a sound of
such lamentation as I never heard before. It
was a woman's wailing cry fast repeated, and
perfectly monotonous, but of such a terrible and
peculiar sorrowfulness, so passionate and
heartbroken, that I could not, dared not, remain
there and listen to it. It was an unbearable
cry which I may never forget, and I turned and
went away from it. I could bear the horrors of
this scene but indifferently, but the grief I could
not bear at all. The cry I heard may have been
that of a mother with her dear, dear boy brought
back to her—and this I fancied to be the case;
or it may have been the wail of some widow—
but I know of it that it was unbearable to hear,
and that I went away from its sound with a
miserable heart.

And so I passed by all this row of houses and
saw that they were filled with coffins. Some
were piled upon the bedsteads, and some propped
on benches and stools on the floor and covered
with sheets, through which their hideous
outlines showed. Over some, newly arrived, the
neighbours were standing in groups, and loving
hands were arranging the dead, and wiping the
stains from their faces, as it seemed. Some
were silent, which was very terrible, and some
were moaning and weeping; but none were
crying with the same peculiar wail which I had
heard issuing from that house at the end of the
village.

Most of the houses had their doors standing
open, and in one instance, where two of the
doors came very near together, a couple of
children—a girl and boy, I think—were playing
at bo-peep, in and out.

Was that not a dream either? No. I neither
heard the sound of the woman's wail, nor saw
the children playing at bo-peep in a terrible
dream, any more than the other horrors that I
had witnessed.

I was awake and standing on English soil, in
the village of New Hartley, in Northumberland.
The grey stone building like a tower was the
fatal Hartley Colliery. The rack-like wheels
and cords that rose above it formed part of the
apparatus for lowering the pitmen into the shaft,
and bringing them up again; and the bodies
which I had seen brought up from that black
chasm were those of the miners who perished
in the depths three hundred feet below.

Before returning to the colliery, I lingered a
little longer in the village and noticed more of
that sullen expression of which I have spoken
appearing in many faces. I noticed, too, to my
surprise, that there was a sort of gala-look about
the inside of the houses. Far from having
neglected to put things straight, as one would have
thought they would, the miserable inhabitants
seemed to have brightened everything up, and
arranged their abodes with a more than common
care and neatness. I have also an impression that
the women were smartly and carefully dressed.
Among the people outside the houses this
certainly was so, and artificial flowers were stuck
in their bonnets in most cases—flowers of the
brightest kind. A couple of drunken men were
reeling along the main thoroughfare, and I lost
sight of them as they plunged into one of the
houses where the crowd was thickest round a
corpse. The little Methodist chapel in the
middle of the village was open and full of people,