This miner had long done his day's work in the mine, and after his pipe was going to work in his garden, where his vegetables were coming forward very well. Nothing could have been better than his manners--quiet, manly, civil, without the rather aggravating slyness of the ordinary French peasant, and with absolutely nothing of the infantine swagger of the small French _bourgeois_. These miners here wear a picturesque and practical costume, something between the garb of a sailor and the garb of a fireman, and as their life--like the life of a fireman or a sailor--is lived a good deal apart from the lives of other men, and has a constant spice in it of possible danger, they acquire a certain self-reliance and self-possession which give them a natural ease and even dignity of carriage. In talking with more than one of them I thought I detected a slight tone of contempt towards other workmen and especially towards the peasants, such as tinges the talk of a sailor about land-lubbers. M. Guary confirmed this, and told me that the men, especially of the old mining stock, certainly do regard themselves as rather better than their neighbours. This may have something to do with the Conservative strength in this region. Politics do not apparently run very high among the miners, either here or in the adjoining region of the Pas-de-Calais. Valenciennes covers three electoral districts, and the Anzin concessions extend into each of these districts. In the second or St.-Amand district there was rather a lively contest in September, between M. Girot, a Republican, and M. de Carpentier, a Boulangist. The latter received 5,894 votes, but the former was elected, with 8,331 votes. In the first Valenciennes district the outgoing member, an Imperialist, M. Renard, was re-elected, receiving 5,803 votes, against 4,856 given to his Republican competitor. In the second district another outgoing member, M. Thellier de Poncheville, a leading Royalist, was also re-elected, receiving 8,690 votes, against 7,263 given to his Republican opponent. In both of these cases it came within my knowledge that the authorities of the Department made the most open and unscrupulous efforts to prevent the return of the outgoing members. Both M. Thellier de Poncheville and M. Renard, however, sate on M. Pion's Committee on the mines, and the mining population of the region appear to have a singularly clear notion of the difference between sense and nonsense in dealing with mining matters.