We travelled the next day to North Shields, and the gloom that was still evidently hanging over the old man's brow was darkened by the increased illness of the _Roman Nose_, who had been for some weeks slightly ailing, but on that day was attacked for the first time with some fever. The Doctor's alarm was such that he stayed constantly by him, and did not accompany his friend Jim and one or two others with Daniel to the coalpit. This, from the repeated representations of Daniel and their old friend _Bobasheela_, was one of the greatest curiosities in the kingdom, and they were not disappointed in it. In this enterprise I did not accompany them, but from their representations ascertained that they descended more than two thousand feet and then travelled half a mile or so under the sea--that there were fifty horses and mules at that depth under the ground, that never will come up, drawing cars loaded with coal on railways, and six or seven hundred men, women, and children, as black as negroes, and many of these who seldom come up, but sleep there at nights. This scene shocked them even more than the sights they had seen in York, for they seemed to think that the debtors' cells in a prison would be far preferable to the slavery they there saw, of "hundreds of women and children drawing out, as they said, from some narrow places where the horses could not go, little carriages loaded with coal; where the women had to go on their hands and knees through the mud and water, and almost entirely naked, drawing their loads by a strap that was buckled around their waists; their knees and their legs and their feet, which were all naked, were bleeding with cuts from the stones, and their hands also; they drew these loads in the dark, and they had only a little candle to see the way." This surprising scene, which took them hours to describe to their companions, became more surprising when Daniel told them of "the vast number of such mines in various parts of the kingdom, and of the fact that many people in some parts have been born in those mines, and gone to school in them, and spent their lives, without ever knowing how the daylight looked." Daniel reminded them of the hundreds of mines he had pointed out to them while travelling by the railroads, and that they were all under ground, like what they had seen. Here was rich subject for Jim, for another entry in his book, of the statistics of England; and Daniel, always ready, turned to the page in his own note-book, and soon got for Jim's memorandum the sum total of coalpits and mines in the kingdom, and the hundreds of thousands of human _civilized_ beings who were imprisoned in them.