During the construction of the present London and North-Western Railway, a landlady at Hillmorton, near Rugby, of very sharp practice, which she had imbibed in dealings for many years with canal boatmen, was constantly remarking aloud that no navvy should ever “do” her; and although the railway was in her immediate neighbourhood, and although the navvies were her principal customers, she took pleasure on every opportunity in repeating the invidious remark.
It had, however, one fine morning scarcely left her large, full-blown, rosy lips, when a fine-looking young fellow, walking up to her, carrying in both hands a huge stone bottle, commonly called “a grey-neck,” briefly asked her for “half a gallon of gin;” which was no sooner measured and poured in than the money was rudely demanded before it could be taken away.
On the navvy declining to pay the exorbitant price asked, the landlady, with a face like a peony, angrily told him he must either pay for the gin or instantly return it.
He silently chose the latter, and accordingly, while the eyes of his antagonist were wrathfully fixed upon his, he returned into her measure the half-gallon, and then quietly walked off; but having previously put into his grey-neck half a gallon of water, each party eventually found themselves in possession of half a gallon of gin and water; and, however either may have enjoyed the mixture, it is historically recorded at Hillmorton that the landlady was never again heard unnecessarily to boast “that no navvy could ‘do’ her.”
A navvy at Kilsby, being asked why he did not go to church? dully answered in geological language—“Why, Soonday hasn’t cropped out here yet!” By which he meant that the clergyman appointed to the new village had not yet arrived.
The contrast which exists between the character of the French and English navigator may be briefly exemplified by the following trifling anecdote:—
In excavating a portion of the first tunnel east of Rouen towards Paris, a French miner dressed in his blouse, and an English “navvy” in his white smock jacket, were suddenly buried alive together by the falling in of the earth behind them. Notwithstanding the violent commotion which the intelligence of the accident excited above ground, Mr. Meek, the English engineer who was constructing the work, after having quietly measured the distance from the shaft to the sunken ground, satisfied himself that if the men, at the moment of the accident, were at the head of “the drift” at which they were working, they would be safe.
Accordingly, getting together as many French and English labourers as he could collect, he instantly commenced sinking a shaft, which was accomplished to the depth of 50 feet in the extraordinary short space of eleven hours, and the men were thus brought up to the surface alive.
The Frenchman, on reaching the top, suddenly rushing forwards, hugged and embraced on both cheeks his friends and acquaintances, many of whom had assembled, and then, almost instantly overpowered by conflicting feelings,—by the recollection of the endless time he had been imprisoned—and by the joy of his release,—he sat down on a log of timber, and, putting both his hands before his face, he began to cry aloud most bitterly.
The English “navvy” sat himself down on the very same piece of timber—took his pit-cap off his head—slowly wiped with it the perspiration from his hair and face—and then, looking for some seconds into the hole or shaft close beside him through which he had been lifted, as if he were calculating the number of cubic yards that had been excavated, he quite coolly, in broad Lancashire dialect, said to the crowd of French and English who were staring at him as children and nursery-maids in our London Zoological Gardens stand gazing half terrified at the white bear,