beyond a certain depth, are now regarded, for at
least the practical purposes of the miner, and until the value of coal
shall have risen considerably, as wrought out. One of these villages,
whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate
vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched assemblage of dingy,
low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all
the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that
still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as
the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated
little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay,
eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a commission to
inquire into the nature and results of female labour in the coal-pits of
Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty
miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners
that both his father and grandfather had been slaves--that he himself
had been born a slave--and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the
neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father
and grandfather had been parishioners of the late Dr. Carlyle of
Inveresk. They were cotemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and
Fox; and at a time when Granville Sharpe could have stepped forward and
effectually protected the runaway negro who had taken refuge from the
tyranny of his master in a British port, no man could have protected
_them_ from the Inveresk laird, their proprietor, had they dared to
exercise the right, common to all Britons besides, of removing to some
other locality, or of making choice of some other employment. Strange
enough, surely, that so entire a fragment of the barbarous past should
have been thus dovetailed into the age not yet wholly passed away! I
regard it as one of the more singular circumstances of my life, that I
should have conversed with Scotchmen who had been born slaves. The
collier women of this village--poor over-toiled creatures, who carried
up all the coal from underground on their backs, by a long turnpike
stair inserted in one of the shafts--continued to bear more of the marks
of serfdom still about them than even the men. How these poor women did
labour, and how thoroughly, even at this time, were they characterized
by the slave nature! It has been estimated by a man who knew them
well--Mr. Robert Bald--that one of