10 THE PITMEN. CHAP. I. 



a plunge, a heavy sigh, and a loud bump : then, as it 

 rises, and the sucker begins to act, there is heard a 

 creak, a wheeze, another bump, and then a strong rush of 

 water as it is lifted and poured out. Where engines of 

 a more powerful and improved description are used, the 

 quantity of water raised is enormous as much as a 

 million and a half gallons in the twenty-four hours. 



The pitmen, who work out the coal below ground, or 

 " the lads belaw," as they call themselves, are a peculiar 

 class, quite distinct from the workmen employed on the 

 surface. They are a people with peculiar habits, man- 

 ners, and character, as much so as fishermen and sailors, 

 to whom, indeed, they are supposed, perhaps from the 

 dangerous nature of their calling, to bear a considerable 

 resemblance. Some forty or fifty years since they were 

 a very much rougher and worse-educated class than 

 they are now ; hard workers, but very wild and un- 

 couth ; much given to " steeks," or strikes ; and dis- 

 tinguished, in their hours of leisure and on pay-nights, 

 for their love of cock-fighting, dog-fighting, hard drink- 

 ing, 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 em- 

 ployment, and from the circumstance that the colliers 

 were amongst 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 pitmen ; the 

 abolition of the twelve months' bond to the mine, and 



