Between the two great Tyneside towns the river is narrower than at almost any point of its course from Hexham to the sea. Formerly it washed on either side over a shelving beach, and was but a shallow, inconsequential stream. There is a drawing of Carmichael's, made about the end of the first quarter of the century, in which some boats are unloading in the centre of the Tyne. Carts are drawn up beside them, and the horses in the shafts are not standing in water to the depth of their knees. The shores have been partly built upon and partly dredged away since those days, and there is now a depth of twenty-five feet at low water at Newcastle Quay. The High Level Bridge strides across the river to a point which must have been just outside the walls that Rufus built around his castle. The great well-preserved Norman keep is only a few yards away. On the same eminence, and a little nearer to the river, stands the Moot Hall, or Assize Courts, which--all the rest of Newcastle being a county in itself--is still a part of the county of Northumberland. Here it must have been that the station of Pons Ælii was built, in a position admirable alike for watch and for defence. Much the greater portion of old Newcastle clustered around this elevated spot for many centuries. At a distance of not much more than a hundred yards is the ancient church of St. Nicholas, with its famous lanterned steeple, of which a local poet has sung that "If on St. Nicholas ye once cast an e'e, Ye'll crack on't as lang as ye're leevin'." The Quayside at Newcastle has a long line of handsome stone buildings, intersected here and there by narrow "chares" that lead into the old district of Pandon, where the Saxon Kings of Northumberland are said to have had a palace in the olden time. The quay on the Newcastle side of the river is broad and spacious, but there is no quay space to speak of at Gateshead, where dreary and half-ruinous buildings cluster to the edge of the quay wall. Many of the ancient branches of local trade have died, or are dying, out. From the Tyne much wool was formerly shipped for the Netherlands; to Tyneside came the glass-blowers who were driven out of Lorraine by the persecutions, and here they settled once for all, soon exporting more glass from the Tyne than was made in the whole of France. The first window-glass was manufactured at Newcastle, and used in the windows of the church at Jarrow. There is a Tyneside glass industry still, but it no longer maintains its former eminence amongst local trades. Coal export, iron shipbuilding, chemical manufacture, engineering--these are the employments by which all others have been dwarfed on the banks of the Tyne.