The flooring of this gallery—in fact the whole of it, like the previous one, was of cast iron. In the semicircle of the entrance was a picture of Newcastle, on one side, with its iron bridge and railway combined, and its old stone bridge below. It was very well and characteristically painted, and of a sombre and rather smoky colour, which Captain Oldcastle said was too like to be very pleasing. His thoughts were evidently reverting to the very highly coloured operatic ladies below. On the other side of this entrance was a picture of Durham, with the cathedral among the trees—also a very good and truthful picture. Captain Oldcastle, after great deliberation, and the slow pocketing of both hands, was obliged to confess that it was something like the old place. But this wall was not right—any how—and that spire did not look so—when last he saw it—in short, it was clear he wanted reality, could not make out perspective differences, and preferred the handsome looks of the brunette fruit-bearer in the lower gallery. But though our honest friend had no good taste in pictures, there was a great mass of good solid practical knowledge in the hard-outlined head of this rough captain of the North Sea. It turned out that he was an old friend of Mr. Buddle, the coal engineer of Wallsend, and often quoted him as authority. Chancing to ask him some question about the number of people employed in the coal trade on the Tyne and the Wear, he said that he had heard Buddle say (twenty years ago) there were nearly 5,000 boys, and quite 3,500 men _underground_ in the works near the Tyne: and nearly 3,000 men, and 700 boys above ground. On the Wear, he said there were 9,000. All of these were employed in the mines, and taking the coal to the ships on the two rivers. Captain Oldcastle estimated the vessels employed at about 1,400, which would require 15,000 sailors and boys to work them “as all ought to be.” Besides these, there were lots more hands in other parts of the great coal trade of the north. But as this estimate of his friend Buddle, we remarked, had been made twenty years ago, was it not pretty certain that the numbers had immensely increased by this time? To this the Captain replied that it was so, no doubt; and supposing that every other district, besides the North, of the entire coal trade of England, had increased in the same proportion, and if you added to this all the agents, factors, clerks, subordinates, whippers, lightermen, wharfingers, &c., there would be found upwards of 200,000 men engaged in the Coal trade of England,—enough, he added with a grimly comical look, if a war broke out, to furnish the army and navy with 20,000 men each, at a week’s notice.