One shrinks, however, amid such an atmosphere
[Illustration: THE TYNE, HEXHAM, NORTHUMBERLAND]
as lies between the covers of this book, with something of dismay from the smoke, the uproar, and the resounding clamour through which the Tyne moves from Newcastle to the sea, with its busy shipyards, its coal-mines, its foundries. But from another point of view it is well worth the voyage down by one of the little steamers that ply continually to Tweedmouth, in which brief hour or two the very heart and vitals of the industrial North reveal themselves at close quarters; for the Tyne, though full of the largest ships, is comparatively narrow to its mouth both on the Durham and Northumbrian shores, each resounding with human energy in its noisiest and most strenuous forms. A striking feature of the Tyne, too, is the alacrity with which at the last moment it shakes all this off, and flows out under the ruinous Abbey of Tynemouth and over the narrow bar, between yellow sands and woody cliffs, into the fresh blue sea, as if the murky pandemonium had been but a hideous dream.
Almost every one knows the look of Newcastle, seeing how imposing is the view of town and river from the lofty railroad bridge on the highway to Scotland. Nor from that point is it easy to realise that, 12 or 15 miles above, this same river is brawling wide over a stony bed, with trout and samlets leaping in its clear streams. The "Tynesider" is the product of this lower and industrial stretch of the river, and not by any means a person who lives anywhere upon its banks. He is a type unto himself, and speaks a vernacular all his own, and the most unintelligible to the stranger of all North-country dialects. His ancestors were, for the most part, ordinary rural Northumbrians, dalesmen or otherwise. But the atmosphere of the coal trade, carried on quite actively since the Tudor period, has formed a type of man blunt of manner and raucous of speech, into which all who come are absorbed. Such is the Tynesider in the true meaning of the term. As a matter of fact, the colliery district of Northumberland is extremely small, and mainly confined to the south-eastern corner of the county, the rest of which is as sweet as Westmoreland. Twenty miles up the river, and half-a-dozen beyond the limits of the smirched country, the finely situated uplifted town of Hexham, crowned with its exquisite Abbey church, stands near the parting of the streams. If the Tyne is relatively narrow at Newcastle for the navies it floats, it is extremely wide at Hexham for a river of its boisterous quality. The sober interludes in which both Wye and Severn indulge between their shallows are brief and rare upon the Tynes. Severally and in their final partnership they remain gigantic mountain brooks almost to the end, and this is why they have punished Newcastle so fearfully in former days. In the eighteenth century the main bridge, covered then with dwellings, and full at the time of sleeping inmates, was swept into space and darkness in a few seconds. Few of the bridges on either Tyne have failed to succumb at one time or another to its fury. That at Hexham has seven arches, which will indicate the breadth of the river. Even when parted just above, each branch forms a salmon river of the first class as regards size, while the North Tyne is so in the more literal sense. The South Tyne, rather the smaller, and though always imposing and often beautiful the least so of the two, comes up from the very south-east corner of the county.