; and as boxing was a
favourite pastime among them, our youth had to fight his way to their
respect, passing through a campaign of no less than seventeen pitched
battles. He was several times on the point of abandoning the work
altogether, rather than undergo the buffetings and insults to which he
was almost a daily martyr, when a protracted contest with one of the
noted boxers of the colliery, in which he proved the victor, at length
relieved him from further persecution.

In the following year, at the age of sixteen, he was articled as an
engineer for five years to the owners of Percy Main, and was placed
under the charge of Mr. Robinson, the engine-wright of the colliery.
His wages as apprentice were 8s. a week; but by working over-hours,
making wooden wedges used in pit-work, and blocking out segments of
solid oak required for walling the sides of the mine, he considerably
increased his earnings, which enabled him to add to the gross income of
the family, who were still struggling with the difficulties of small
means and increasing expenses. When not engaged upon over-work in the
evenings, he occupied himself in self-education. He drew up a scheme
of daily study with this object, to which he endeavoured to adhere as
closely as possible,--devoting the evenings of Mondays to mensuration
and arithmetic; Tuesdays to history and poetry; Wednesdays to
recreation, novels, and romances; Thursdays to algebra and mathematics;
Fridays to Euclid and trigonometry; Saturdays to recreation; and
Sundays to church, Milton, and recreation. He was enabled to extend
the range of his reading by the help of the North Shields Subscription
Library, to which his father entered him a subscriber. Portions of his
spare time were also occasionally devoted to mechanical construction,
in which he cultivated the useful art of handling tools. One of his
first attempts was the contrivance of a piece of machinery worked by a
weight and a pendulum, that should at the same time serve for a
timepiece and an orrery; but his want of means, as well as of time,
prevented him prosecuting this contrivance to completion. He was more
successful with the construction of a fiddle, on which he was ambitious
to become a performer. It must have been a tolerable instrument, for a
professional player offered him 20s. for it. But though he succeeded
in making a fiddle, and for some time persevered in the attempt to play
upon it, he did not succeed in producing