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 _debris_ 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,