Let us now return to the principal entrance, and ascend to the first gallery. The panels all round, are painted as below. The chief subject of most of them appears to be a colliery—that is, the works above ground, such as the little black house of the steam-engine, with its long chain passing over the drum, and then over a wheel above the pit’s mouth. The first we come to is the celebrated Wallsend colliery. Each has fanciful designs above and beneath, as if to atone for the dark reality of the centre piece, picturesque as this is always made. Over some of these we find heraldic monsters of the right frightful Order of the Griffin, prancing above greyhounds who crouch on each side of a large ornamental cup, not unlike a head-dress of the ancient South American Indians, which however is supported by a lady in the bright costume of a Mexican peasant, wearing wings. Beneath there lies a rich grouping of grapes, arborescent ferns, with vulture-headed griffins, and flowers of the cactus. The collieries are occasionally varied with a sea-piece, in which, of course, a black collier-vessel is sailing from the North. Sometimes the scene is a shore-piece with a collier boat; but presided over by the usual sort of nut-brown mining beauty with Italian eyes, and hair in no particular order, bearing a fruit-basket on her head, piled up with all sorts of ripe fruit of the most tempting size and colour. Beneath her, we again find the griffin vultures holding watch over some logs of antediluvian trees. Wandering onwards in this way, we observed, a little in advance of us, a seafaring man, in a rough blue pilot coat, with a face so weather-beaten that it looked as hard as a ship’s figure-head, and a pair of great dangling hands that seemed hewn out of solid oak. He was very busy in front of one of the panels, admiring a lady with very good-humoured black eyes, and cheeks as red as ripe tomatos, carrying on her head a basket of Orlean plums and alligator pears, richly grouped with a profusion of grapes, and crimson flowers of the cactus. Her face was turned smilingly upwards at a collier brig in full sail. We congratulated him on his ‘choice,’ and the suggestion appearing to please his fancy, a little colloquy ensued, from which it turned out that he was Thomas Oldcastle, of Durham, captain of the collier brig ‘Shiner,’ of South Shields, and having just discharged his cargo at Rotherhithe, had come to London to amuse himself for a few hours. Arriving at the entrance in the course of our talk, we ascended the stairs together, and soon reached the second gallery.