It was a long walk for a had never been lost. My

walked from the one place to the other. boy of fourteen, and the recollection of it companions in that memorable walk had long since passed away. But they lived again as I set out in the dogcart provided by my host of the County Hotel, to retrace the steps of my lost youth. A fairer day's drive no man need wish. Ascending from the delightful summer meadows of Rothbury, I followed the Coquet in its upward course by Thropton, Sharperton, and Harbottle, until I reached the remote hamlet of Alwinton at the foot of the Cheviots. All along the valley the scenery was typically English of the best kind. At Harbottle the remains of the old castle where one queen was imprisoned and another born, were still to be seen. This mouldering keep was in the old days the stronghold of the Warden of the Middle Marches, the warrior whose business it was to keep Central Northumberland free from the encroachments of the reiving Scot. At Alwinton, as at Harbottle, an eminence near the village bore the name of Gallows Law. It was the old place of execution, in the days when the chief of each small border hamlet held power of life and death in his hands and used it freely. From the Gallows Law at Alwinton there is a wonderful view into the very heart of the Cheviots. These billow-like hills, covered with grass and heather, have a charm peculiar to themselves. The pity is that so few persons visit them, and that one of the healthiest and most picturesque districts of England is practically unknown to the tourist. Here at least the tired Londoner can revel in absolute solitude. As I stood on the Gallows Law, where many a moss-trooper had met his death of old, I could not see a single human being, I could hardly see a human habitation. The distant barking of a dog was the only sound that broke the stillness of the summer air. The voices of the dead who had been my companions all along the valley were the only voices that I heard.

There was one other spot familiar in times past to which my pilgrimage led me. This was Tynemouth, the picturesque old watering-place which faces the German Ocean at the mouth of the Tyne. It was changed, as were all the spots I visited, but changed wholly for the better. Its gardens and the sea-banks were better kept than of yore. Unlike most of our watering-places nowadays, it had not been over-built; and the splendid sea, with its silvery waves breaking on the Long Sands or the rocks at the Ox Ford, was the same rushing, resistless ocean as of old. The finest feature of Tynemouth is the Castle Rock, a bold promontory of sand-stone jutting out into the sea, crowned by the grand ruins of Tynemouth Priory, and by the white lighthouse, which from time immemorial has guided the mariner seeking to enter the river below. The place has now a new attraction in the shape of the majestic crescent-shaped piers which stretch forth into the sea from either side of the river. The North Pier is more than half a mile in length, whilst its sister pier jutting from South Shields is longer still. These massive

say.

structures have been for more than forty years in course of construction, and their like is hardly to be found elsewhere upon the surface of the globe. They have converted the once dangerous entrance to the Tyne into a vast harbour of refuge, where a fleet of ironclads might lie in safety. How many times during the past forty years the whole work of a summer- for it is only in summer that real work is possible—has been undone in a single night of tempest, I dare not But at last the piers are practically finished and their formal opening is at hand. One cannot conceive a more picturesque spectacle than that which is presented as one stands at the end of the North Pier. Between it and the South Pier there is an opening a third of a mile in width, and through that opening the commerce of one of the greatest English ports passes daily. There go the ships,' from the humble ocean tramp to the mighty ironclad fresh from its cradle at Elswick. One of these same ironclads passed out upon its steam trial trip as I watched the scene, and for six hours it cruised up and down in front of Tynemouth at a speed of nineteen knots. Why a watering-place which possesses such special attractions of its own is so little known beyond the limits of Northumberland is a point that baffles understanding.

I renewed my acquaintance with picturesque Cullercoats, beloved of artists, and Whitley, where for many a summer I had enjoyed myself as a child among the sands and rocks, in the course of a long drive. Unlike Tynemouth, these once beautiful spots had been altered for the worse. The plague of cheap building had afflicted them, and the fields I knew of old were now a wilderness of bricks. But my drive carried me beyond the building limit. I went as far as Seaton Delavel Hall, once one of the stateliest of English mansions, the work of Sir John Vanbrugh, and generally recognised as superior in beauty and majesty to Blenheim itself. The greater part of the mansion has stood for more than a century in ruins. The wicked Delavels' have disappeared, and the strange rites and unholy sports which were once carried on within the grey walls are now only matter of tradition. One of the three huge pavilions which constitute the hall has been restored by the present owner, Lord Hastings, and he lives there on the scene of the former grandeur of an ancient family.

It was at Delavel Hall that I had an unusual experience. As we drove near the front of the house, my companion bade the coachman stop, and pointed out the different features of the building to me. 'Do you see the housemaid standing at that window?' said my host's wife, indicating an upper window in the central pavilion. I saw some one at the spot indicated, but my defective vision did not allow me to recognise the sex or condition of the stranger until I had donned my spectacles. Then I saw plainly and unmistakably a woman clad in the dress of a housemaid apparently watching us as

we sat in the carriage. 'Well,' I said by-and-by; what about the housemaid?' 'Oh, don't you know? That is the ghost!' I laughed at the notion, for there was certainly nothing ghost-like about the figure I was watching. At a sign from my host, the carriage advanced a few paces, and instantly the woman at the window vanished. I saw at the same moment that the window at which I had seen the figure belonged to the ruined portion of the hall. The apparition was of course nothing more than a curious optical illusion, the effect of the lights and shadows from the carved stone-work adjoining the window; but so real was the spectral appearance, that I was not surprised that local tradition claimed it unhesitatingly as the ghost of a building which, if tradition speaks truly of its former owners, might certainly well be haunted.

But it is not Seaton Delavel Hall, it is the engine-house of a colliery that stands within a stone's throw of the gates at the foot of the long avenue, that furnishes the haunted ground of this part of Northumberland. As I drove up to the well-remembered pit-buildings, I was surprised to see that smoke was issuing from the tall chimney, and that there were signs of cheerful life about the place. When last I had seen it the shadow of doom hung over it, and the rusting ironwork, the mouldering pit-heap, the disused tramways all told their own tale of ruin and death. Four-and-thirty years ago, in the month of January 1862, all England was awaiting in breathless suspense the issue of a struggle which was being carried on at this spot. More than 200 men and boys had been made prisoners in the pit, by the blocking of the single shaft which gave admission to it. The accident was due to the breaking of the great beam of a pumping-engine, which worked directly above the opening of the shaft. When the beam broke one-half fell into the pit, and choked it. For a whole week, a bitter week in mid-winter, I was one of those who stood on this pit-heap and watched the ceaseless and heroic efforts of brave men to rescue the imprisoned miners. To the last we hoped against hope, telling ourselves tales of the signalling we had heard from the prisoners beneath our feet, and fondly deluding ourselves with the idea that, as they had a sufficiency of food and water, they must be safe. Only a few men could work at once in the confined space of the shaft, and their task was one of excessive peril. They hung suspended by ropes in the depths of the pit, with water pouring incessantly upon them, with the crumbling sides of the shaft continually giving way, threatened at every moment by a terrible death, but not for a single instant by day or night desisting from their efforts. In the meantime, all England was thrilled with the story of the imprisoned miners, and shared in the suspense which chained the wives and mothers of the captives to the pit-heap, day after day throughout that week of anguish. It was in the dead of the winter night that those of us who stood upon the platform at the mouth of the pit learned the dreadful truth. A sharp signal had

been given from below, and at once the sinkers working in the shaft had been drawn up. For a moment we hoped that the signal meant that the lost had been recovered, and our hearts beat quickly with joyous anticipation. But too soon the bitter truth was made clear. As the sinkers were brought to the surface, it was found that all were unconscious, and we knew that they had succumbed to the deadly gases of the mine. Restoratives were at hand, but before they could be applied to the victims, the master-sinker, Coulson by name, whose own son was among the men lying on the pit-heap unconscious, stooped and kissed his boy, and then calmly took his place in the dangling noose, and bade them lower him into the shaft. There was not one of us who would have given sixpence for his life at that moment. That has always seemed to me to have been the bravest deed I ever witnessed.

When Coulson disappointed our fears by coming back to the surface alive he told the awful tale. The obstruction had been at last removed, but 'the pit was foul,' and we knew that it held none but the dead. As I look at the place on this bright July day of 1896, I find it difficult to realise all the horrors of which I was a witness here thirty-four years ago. Yet I can still see the uncoffined dead being brought to bank-twenty hours being occupied in that task alone. I can recall the smile of peace which rested upon every grimy face; ay, and I recollect the tears with which the brave men who had gone down into the depths of the pit told me of how they had found the victims sitting in long rows side by side, waiting for the help which was to come too late, and of how the fathers had their boys folded in their arms, whilst brothers and friends sat with clasped hands, in patient silence. One slight record of the captivity was left in the shape of a cheap memorandum book, in which one of the prisoners had pencilled a few words telling of the prayer meeting that had been held and the ' exhortation' that had been given in the early hours of their imprisonment. But the record broke off little more than four-and-twenty hours after the closing of the shaft, and we comforted ourselves with the thought that their agony had been brief, as their end was undoubtedly painless. Away yonder stands the grey tower of Earsdon Church, steeped in the summer sunlight. At its foot, in one vast common grave, lie the two hundred men and boys who died thus in the New Hartley Pit in January 1862. I can still see the long procession of coffins being carried between the leafless hedges. I seem to hear again the wail of the old hymn, ‘O God, our help in ages past,' which filled the air as the whole manhood of the village of Hartley was borne to the tomb. It is haunted ground, truly, on which I stand; and I realise afresh not only the perils and heroism of the miner's daily life, but the fact that the man who, after the lapse of a generation, revisits the home of his youth, must of necessity sojourn among ghosts.

WEMYSS REID.

AN ATTEMPT AT OPTIMISM

It seems at the present moment probable that pessimism and consequent dejection will share the fate of all the pegs on which men have hung their theories since they have begun to think consecutively. They are momentarily in possession of the field; therefore pessimism and its result dejection are made to appear the sufficient cause of masses of phenomena for which they do not really account.

An important consideration seems to be ignored, not only in the easy and cheap form of pessimism to be found as the keynote of books of inferior value, but in some works of real merit. It deals with the necessity of realising, however positive our knowledge, that the margin which extends beyond it is limitless. There is more comfort to be derived from the 'Je ne sais pas' of Pascal than from the 'Que sais-je?' of Montaigne; for in that unknown tract which lies beyond our powers of conception, our imagination can conjure up the possibility of the sudden appearance of a factor, at present undiscovered, which may alter the aspect of the problem so completely as sometimes to appear almost to reverse it.

Instances of this may be shown in the study of, let us say, the science of chemistry, where the qualities of a chemical substance may be altered by combination with a new element. And what of the inexact sciences, medicine for instance, all the greater for being inexact-for where would the sudden inspiration of the great physician come in if he could fall back on exact knowledge? This difficulty is still greater in the scientific study of heredity; with the countless possibilities of unknown and undiscoverable elements making anything like a rigid deduction from the known to the unknown a sheer impossibility. We are confronted here by a double puzzle; since, if deluded for an instant by the belief that we are in possession of undoubted facts unrolling themselves in orderly sequence from generation to generation, we are immediately repulsed by the perception that the effect of peculiar and special surroundings on each agent must modify the problem as a whole and make it more complex than ever. And there are greater mysteries than either of these behind the science of the Psychology or the Pathology of mind. The human brain-its marvellous powers, its dismal failures, its latent and unexplored potentialities—who can