ery well, standing at ease in his doorway and surveying the
scene with a pipe in his mouth. He was a shrewd, stalwart man of about
forty, who glanced down complacently at his own well-developed limbs and
laughed scornfully when I asked him what he thought of a proposition I
had seen made at Paris, by a friend of the workmen, that forty should be
fixed as the age of retiring pensions for miners. 'He may be a friend,'
said the miner, 'but certainly he is not a miner!'

This miner had long done his day's work in the mine, and after his pipe
was going to work in his garden, where his vegetables were coming
forward very well. Nothing could have been better than his
manners--quiet, manly, civil, without the rather aggravating slyness of
the ordinary French peasant, and with absolutely nothing of the
infantine swagger of the small French _bourgeois_. These miners here
wear a picturesque and practical costume, something between the garb of
a sailor and the garb of a fireman, and as their life--like the life of
a fireman or a sailor--is lived a good deal apart from the lives of
other men, and has a constant spice in it of possible danger, they
acquire a certain self-reliance and self-possession which give them a
natural ease and even dignity of carriage. In talking with more than one
of them I thought I detected a slight tone of contempt towards other
workmen and especially towards the peasants, such as tinges the talk of
a sailor about land-lubbers. M. Guary confirmed this, and told me that
the men, especially of the old mining stock, certainly do regard
themselves as rather better than their neighbours.

This may have something to do with the Conservative strength in this
region. Politics do not apparently run very high among the miners,
either here or in the adjoining region of the Pas-de-Calais.
Valenciennes covers three electoral districts, and the Anzin concessions
extend into each of these districts. In the second or St.-Amand
district there was rather a lively contest in September, between M.
Girot, a Republican, and M. de Carpentier, a Boulangist. The latter
received 5,894 votes, but the former was elected, with 8,331 votes. In
the first Valenciennes district the outgoing member, an Imperialist, M.
Renard, was re-elected, receiving 5,803 votes, against 4,856 given to
his Republican competitor.

In the second district another outgoing member, M. Thellier de
Poncheville, a leading Royalist, was also re-elected, receivin