The Central Station at Newcastle, familiar to all who take the East Coast route to Scotland, is a vast bewildering place. The great bridge by which it is approached, spanning the Tyne at a height of more than a hundred feet above high water mark, the blackened Norman keep that guards its portals, give it an air of distinction that no London railway station can command. It is the same station that I saw opened to the world more than six-and-forty years ago, when the opening ceremony consisted of a dinner to Robert Stephenson, the famous son of a still more famous father. But it has been more than doubled in size since then, and where once there was comparative spaciousness and leisure, there is now crowding and bustling, such as even Charing Cross cannot show. One was bewildered by the labyrinth of sidings and main lines that covered the vast roofed-in area. This after all was not the station I had once known. Out in the streets the landmarks of my youth were still to be seen. The noble lantern tower of St. Nicholas-the most graceful edifice of the kind in England-remained unchanged, though in absence the building it adorns had been transformed from a mere parish church into a cathedral. Grey Street, the thoroughfare which Newcastle owes to the genius and courage of Richard Grainger, and which is a glorified Regent Street in stone instead of stucco, was as stately as of yore; and the other well-planned harmonious thoroughfares that once made the town an example to the cities of the earth, were what they used to be. But now hurrying crowds filled the pavements, whilst beyond this central portion of the city spread a vast town of which I knew nothing. It had more than doubled in population since I last dwelt within its walls, and the area it covered had increased in a still larger proportion. As I wandered through the once-familiar streets that morning, or traversed new thoroughfares where houses had taken the place of hedge-rows, effacing the meadows where I had played as a child, two lines of Tennyson's were constantly running in my brain : my There rolls the deep where grew the tree. The deep seemed to have rolled above my own head. Like Esmond at his mother's grave, I felt as one who walked beneath the sea. It was sad enough to have to go to the quiet cemetery beside the moor, in order to find one's friends. It touched one's heart to the quick to stand again before the house that had once been a home, and to find that, instead of the far-reaching prospect over hill and moor and sea, all that the dwellers in it could now command was 'the other side of the way.' But these are the necessary incidents of a return after so long an absence, and being in the nature of private griefs they can hardly be obtruded here. There was much, however, in this new view of a place which still dwelt freshly in my memory, as I had known it in 1860, that had a more public interest. It was impossible not to be struck by the immense advance in material wealth and luxury of life that had taken place in the interval. There were fewer ragged children in the streets. The houses were bigger and better decorated. The shops were infinitely better supplied than of yore. There were many handsome carriages. There was a general air of prosperity about the place that was not to be mistaken, and that I had not known in the past. For that prosperity Newcastle is largely indebted to the genius of one man. As a youth I remember a plain house in Westgate Street, upon the door of which was a worn brass plate bearing the words, 'Mr. Armstrong, solicitor.' The Mr. Armstrong of forty years ago was an eminently respectable member of his profession. Some good people, it is true, shook their heads when they heard that instead of attending to conveyances and writs and mortgages, he had taken to dabbling in mechanics. Not that way does fortune lie in the profession of the law. But one day I was taken as a boy to see a remarkable new toy— it seemed nothing more—that had been placed upon the Quayside at Newcastle, where a few small steamers and Dutch merchantmen were in the habit of coming with cargo. It looked like a metal box, with some curious handles not unlike water-taps, upon the lid. A goodnatured workman turned one of these handles, and lo! as he did so, a great crane hard by rattled its chain, and slowly but surely swung a heavy load into the air. It was like magic. Now try it yourself,' said the man, as he stopped the movement of the crane. Timidly I moved the handle, and straightway the miracle was repeated. At the touch of a child the heavy load was at once borne upwards. It's arl dune by watter,' said the man, and it's Armstrong the solicitor in Westgate Street that's invented it.' That was the first hydraulic crane. 'Mr. Armstrong, solicitor,' had found his true calling in life. He still kept up the practice of his profession. But he bought a small bit of ground by the side of the Tyne, away from the town on the Scotswood Road, and there he raised a modest building within which the manufacture of his new hydraulic machinery was undertaken. I remember the place well. Many a time I accompanied my father on a round of pastoral calls among the plain people who lived at Elswick, in small cottages with little gardens attached, in which marigolds and carnations bloomed, and the fragrant lad's love was invariably to be found. There are no gardens there now. From that humble beginning of more than forty years ago has sprung the vast Elswick establishment, which knows only one rival in Europe. Fifteen thousand workmen are busy from day to day at furnace, forge, and lathe. Where once the flowers bloomed and the cattle fed on the riverside meadows there is now a range of industrial buildings a mile in length; and a whole town has grown up in that which I can still remember as rustic Elswick- the place where as a boy I roamed in the fields, or rowed in one of Harry Clasper's boats upon the river. Of course the place had begun to make great strides forward before I left Newcastle in 1862. The famous rifled gun had been invented, and was becoming almost as important an article of manufacture as the hydraulic cranes and rams. But since then the development of the establishment has been almost appalling, and I could not recognise the scenes once so familiar. It is Mr. Armstrong, solicitor,' now Lord Armstrong, who has given the impetus to the industrial progress of the Tyne. He is the magnet who draws to the old town that cosmopolitan company I noted at the breakfast table. But it is not my business to describe the vast Elswick works, the greatest of their kind in the United Kingdom, if not in the world. I have but to note them among the many changed features in the life of Newcastle. Incidentally they have brought about another change, not less remarkable than the creation of the great industrial suburb of Elswick. I have said that as a boy I have spent many an hour rowing on the Tyne opposite the place where the Elswick works now present their mile-long frontage to the stream. At that time it was almost possible to cross the river dry-shod at low water. The King's Meadows, where the buttercups bloomed in profusion among the grass, formed a group of islets in mid-stream, and no vessel of heavier burden than the characteristic keel of the Tyne-the subject of the familiar song 'Weel may the keel row'-was ever to be seen above the old bridge. Now the King's Meadows have disappeared; the river has been deepened from its mouth to far above Elswick; the old Tyne bridge has been removed, a huge swing bridge moved by hydraulic power taking its place, and great battleships-ships as big as the ill-fated Victoria-are not only built at Elswick, but are able to traverse the river safely from that spot to the sea. The story of what has been done for the Clyde by local spirit and engineering genius is matter of history. It is not so generally known that a work at least as great has been done for the Tyne. The river I could have waded across as a boy now bears ships of thousands of tons burden at any state of the tide. I watched with amazed eyes the opening of the huge swing bridge to allow a great ocean steamer to pass down stream. It was swung by a single man just as easily as the hydraulic crane which once stood hard by was moved by my fingers as a boy, and, like the crane, it was the offspring of the brain of the Newcastle solicitor. Politics! One cannot keep away from them even on a holiday. Of late years Newcastle has been chiefly known in the political world in connection with the name of John Morley, its representative in four successive parliaments. But my Newcastle dates from a time when Mr. Morley was still unknown, and it is with other names that I connect it. Between the fifties and sixties Newcastle had a distinguished son, of whom it was half proud, and perhaps a trifle afraid. He went about its streets a plain man among plain men. He spoke with a strong Northumbrian burr; he dressed not unlike a pitman in his Sunday best, wearing always that soft black felt hat which in those days was regarded by timid persons as being in itself the badge of the incendiary and the revolutionist. He was dreaded by the timid Whigs, who were then in the ascendant in the political world, and detested with a whole-hearted intensity by every true Conservative. A great many good citizens sincerely pitied the respectable Mr. Joseph Cowen, senior, because fate had afflicted him with a son so erratic as his namesake, Joseph Cowen, junior. But the more he was dreaded by Whig and hated by Tory, the more ardently was young Joseph Cowen adored by the workpeople and Radicals of Tyneside. His gift of speech-that burning eloquence which in after days was to thrill the House of Commons, and stir the admiration of the coldest and most critical audience in the world-was the pride and the delight of those of us who flocked in those far-off days to the dingy lecture-room in Nelson Street to attend a meeting of the Northern Reform League, or to pass some red-hot resolution against the tyrannical Powers of the continent. For the distinguishing mark of Newcastle Radicalism in those times was its cosmopolitanism. We were all strong for the granting of the suffrage to the working man, and unanimous in our groans when the name of Lord Palmerston fell from the lips of one of our favourite orators. But under 'Joe Cowen's' inspiration we were even more enthusiastic in our interest in the fate of the Pole, Hungarian, and Italian, and our loudest cries of scorn and indignation were reserved for 'the man of the Second of December,' and the King of the Two Sicilies. How we crowded into the old lecture-room in those days of youthful illusion to join in cheering 'Joe,' as he poured forth the burning flood of his tempestuous eloquence against kings and emperors and grand dukes! And with what shouts of heartfelt joy and reverence we received from time to time some scarred victim of the oppressor, or some hero of the war of liberation, who, having reached the hospitable shores of England, found his way as a matter of course to Newcastle, and to the warm shelter of Joseph Cowen's modest house at Blaydon Burn. Garibaldi was one of these, though that was nearly fifty years ago, when, even as a spectator, my part in the reception was but a passive one. But later came Kossuth-grave, pallid, earnest-faced; and Felice Orsini, fresh from his Mantuan dungeon, and with the shadow of the guillotine even then descending upon his head; and Louis Blanc, bristling with witty epigrams against Napoleon the Little; and Dr. Bernard, saved from a French scaffold by the turgid rhetoric of Edwin James; and many another, whose name must live in history. It was good to be alive in those days of generous illusions. Newcastle Radicalism believed in itself then at any rate, and believed also in a cause which was not its own alone. Alas! there are few signs now of the survival of that old spirit of generous sympathy with the oppressed of every land that led the working men, at the close of a day of toil, to give their evenings to the hot and crowded meeting, where they denounced the tyrant with a vociferous heartiness that ought to have made him tremble on his throne. As I walk through the streets of Newcastle to-day I see many announcements of sports of every kind, cricket, golf, bicycling, bowls, but not so much as a handbill summoning my fellow-townsmen, as in the days of old, to a meeting in the lecture-room on behalf of the alien victims of oppression. Tempora mutantur et nos...! Here, as elsewhere, a change has come over the spirit of the people. Newcastle has more theatres and music halls than in those days; more recreation grounds and public sports. It travels more on pleasure. Its grand old moor and leazes have fallen into the hands of the improvers. They are more ornamental; they are more in harmony with modern taste. are they better? And in any case, despite the political clubs which I see in every district, is there more of the real political spirit than there was in the days when Joseph Cowen, with half-a-dozen foreign spies dogging his footsteps even in the streets of his native town, was summoning us to take our part in the battle of freedom? Mr. Cowen represented, as I have said, the extreme Radical element in Newcastle in those days. But we were not without politicians of eminence of a different school. There still survived amongst us Charles Larkin, the Chartist orator, who won a passing notoriety by his declaration (in the Reform agitations of 1830), that a fairer head than that of Adelaide, Queen of England, had already rolled upon the scaffold.' That was an outburst marking the epoch when the favourite cry of the disappointed was that the Queen has done it all.' In my time Mr. Larkin had ceased to be an active politician; I believe had even ceased to be a Radical. He was an extinct volcano; but one that spoke eloquently to us of a great eruption. With him one must place dapper Sir John Fife, the eminent surgeon, who had won his knighthood by boldly charging the assembled Chartists, when as Mayor of Newcastle he led the forces of the Crown against the unlucky people who had the misfortune to be born before their time. Sir John Fife was a plucky fellow, and a good horseman, and his horsemanship most appropriately gained for him his knighthood. Of men of letters in those days we could boast few. Prominent amongst those few was Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the historian of the Roman wall, dear to the elder men of the North to-day because his was the one great public school of Northumberland, at a time when Eton and Harrow were still the preserves of the great and their parasites. But there was one distinguished writer of whom some at least of the people of Newcastle were proud thirty or forty years ago, and concerning whom I venture to tell a simple but veracious tale. Somewhere in the fifties a certain boy in the old town showed a strong desire to embark upon the perilous career of journalism. To him entered one day an old friend of the family, |