In the middle of the following night--repeated explosions having taken place during the day--a remarkable incident occurred. One of the engineers left in charge--named, if I remember aright, Jeffcock--was suddenly startled by hearing a sound proceeding, apparently, from the depths of the pit. He went to the edge of the shaft, and then heard unmistakably, far below him, the "jowl" for which we had listened in vain on the previous morning. It proved that there was someone living in the pit, and Mr. Jeffcock instantly determined to save him if he could. The shaft was a very deep one. The cage which was the ordinary means of descent had, as I have already explained, been destroyed, whilst the pit-sides had been torn by the successive explosions, so that they were in a highly dangerous state. But undaunted by these difficulties and dangers, Jeffcock carried out his heroic task. Summoning assistance, he caused himself to be lowered at the end of a rope to the bottom of the shaft. Heaven only knows what were the terrors and dangers of that descent. He faced them all unflinchingly. At the bottom of the pit he discovered not any member of the search party, for they had all succumbed, but one of the men employed in the colliery, who, by some extraordinary chance, had escaped with his life not only from the original explosion, but from all those which followed it. With immense labour and risk he brought this man, the sole survivor of more than three hundred, to the pit's mouth, and the next night the thoughtless fellow for whom a brave man had risked so much, and whose own escape from death had been almost miraculous, was carousing in a public-house in Barnsley, and pocketing the coppers which hundreds of curious persons paid for the privilege of seeing him. One evening, in the summer of 1866, when I was on duty in the _Mercury_ office, I received a telegram which Mr. Baines had despatched from the House of Commons half an hour before. It stated that the Home Secretary had just received information that Chester Castle had been attacked by five hundred Fenians from Manchester, and that troops were being despatched from London to meet them. I saw that a train which left Leeds late in the evening would land me at Chester an hour or so after midnight, and I at once made up my mind to take it. When I reached Chester all was quiet at the station, and there were no signs of a Fenian rising. I asked the chief official on duty if he knew anything about the affair. All he could tell me was that during the early hours of the evening the waiting rooms, and even the platform itself, had been filled with crowds of "working men in their Sunday clothes," who had seemed to be waiting for somebody or something. There were many hundreds of them, and their unexplained presence had greatly puzzled the railway officials. Some time before I arrived they had disappeared.