These practical men of Newcastle have achieved the most wonderful things. The home of the Stephensons was at Wylam, only nine miles away, and so the town can fairly claim the inventor of railways among its natives. We need not linger to discuss the wonders of the locomotive; they are sufficiently evident. Newcastle men have even changed the character of their river. There are still those who can recollect the Tyne as a shallow stream in which the laden “keels,” heaped up with coal, not infrequently grounded. Nowadays the largest war-vessels are built up-stream, at Elswick, and take their stately way to the sea with their heavy armaments, and no mishap occurs. Clanging arsenals and factories line the banks for many more miles than the historian, anxious for his reputation, dare mention. The Armstrong works alone are over a mile long, and employ some sixteen thousand hands. Lord Armstrong himself was the inventor of hydraulic machinery; and the Swan incandescent electric lamp, which bears the name of its inventor, was the work of a Newcastle man. Others of whom England is proud were born here, notably Admiral Lord Collingwood. To their practicality these men of Newcastle add sentiment, for they have carefully placed tablets on the houses where their celebrated men were born, and they have not only erected a monument to Stephenson, but have also placed one of his first engines—“Puffing Billy”—on a pedestal beside the High Level Bridge, where the huge modern expresses roar past the quaint relic, day and night, in startling contrast. Also, they one and all have the most astonishingly keen affection for their old parish church of St. Nicholas, in these latter days become a cathedral.