and fall back again into the darkness. I
became afraid. I have no hesitation in admitting
it, now that I am secure from the strong and
practically jocular arm of Vigour and the
conceited smirks of Curiosity. Our guide, the Twin,
had passed the door of " the cabin," and led us
many yards astray before we reached it. Was
that reassuring? Was the " I've spent my
life in these workings, and never did such a
thing afore," put forth with as much
confidence as if it were an explanation of the fact,
tended to soothe my alarm? Suppose the Twin
were to lose his way further on in the pit? Suppose
he lost me? Suppose our lights went out?
No man, I firmly believe, ever admired the
eloquence or dramatic genius of Sheridan with
half the fervour I now mentally bestowed upon
what then seemed to me his greatest speech
"Descend a coal-pit for the sake of saying
you've been down? Can't you say so without
going?"

But there is no shirking the programme laid
down by Vigour, and we are borne to a fiery
furnace next. I don't profess to fully understand
its use, for I was too hot and flurried to comprehend
the Twin's explanation. It is connected
in some way with the purification of pit-air,
and with " up-casts" and " down-casts" and
"shafts." To be forcibly held before a fierce
fire (as if there were any enjoyment or
information in being singed), upon which a few
bullocks and a moderately sized flock of
sheep might be roasted whole, does not
aid your comprehension of its use. During
this torture, Curiosity stood in a cool
corner, and chuckled, "How very interesting!"
A couple of hours of unalloyed
wretchedness followed. I am neither awkwardly
tall, like Curiosity, nor inconveniently broad,
like Vigour, but am, I flatter myself, what
milliners call " a neat figure;" yet I knocked and
bruised myself terribly against chains, and
roofs, and trucks. We never stand upright, and
occasionally have to wriggle on our stomachs
like eels. Here and there we are shown
"faults," in which I assume deep interest,
having a hidden fear that, if I fail to
conciliate Twin and Gnome, they will leave me
behind. " Two old men lost here for two days
last summer," says the Twin, philosophically;
"went to look for them arter the second night
missing, and found them sitting quite comfortable,
saying " it wasn't much use hollering
down here, and they know'd they should be
fetched." I learn with a shudder that these
men had worked here since their youth, and,
clutching Vigour's pea-jacket firmly, I show
increased alacrity in obeying the Gnome.'s
monotonous cry, " Come along." A villanous hole,
in which you are shut like a trap, and where
you inhale every variety of baked stench,--
a steep chimney communicating with the pit's
main shaft, and in which you feel like a
salamander, and from which you emerge as
completely " cured" as the finest Wiltshire bacon,
is the next form of misery. Following on this,
we are shown at the end of one subterranean
turning a loose bank of coals like the side of
a pyramid, in which we sink to our middle,
and up which the Gnome plods with Vigour
at his heels, to wave lamps excitedly at the top,
and to ask, with exultation, if I saw "the
lights," as if a feeble moving glimmer on a
section of a London coal-cellar were a spectacle
calculated to fill all souls with joy. The stables,
containing a really fine set of horses, in good
condition, clean, carefully groomed, and
comfortable, are shown next; and a thorough-bred,
who has been guilty of repeated bad behaviour,
and who arrived down yesterday, sentenced to
underground servitude for life, is critically
examined. These stables are distributed about
the " workings," and are chinks in the walls
of coal, roomy and well appointed with racks,
mangers, straw, and other adjuncts to equine
comfort. Horses seldom see daylight again
when they are once set down to pit work,
but live and die in one round of truck-dragging
and tramway-walking, in which the solitary
variation is from "fulls" to "empties," and
from " empties" to " fulls" again.

Up to this time we have only seen the
product of the miners' labours, not the miners
themselves. Every moment I expected to find
myself in the central coal depôt—which, in my
imagination, is a lofty cavern, wherein gangs of
labourers are busily at work. After crawling
and crouching along the windings, one by
one, keeping firm hold of either Vigour or
the Twin, I am told to " look at the way the
coal is got." It is more than a minute before I
discern anything. Then a poor and fitful
glimmer, such as might proceed from a
glowworm of weak constitution, becomes visible
through the intense gloom. A monotonous
tick, tick, as from a magnified death-watch, is
perceptible at the same time; and then, as we
creep nearer, something small and drab, like a
white hat-brush, is seen to be moving to and
fro in mid air, and keeping time to the ticks.
There is nothing else to break the vast black
pall we are piercing. The sickly glowworm
and the restless hat-brush are but dimly seen,
and appear to be at an enormous distance from
where we crawl, and at the end of a long vista
of coal. The ticks, although sounding sharp
and clear, do not prevent our coming to close
quarters with the being causing them, while
we are still speculating where he is. It was
the most curious optical effect I have known,
for there was absolutely no transition
between what seemed to be a distant view and
our almost stumbling over the nigrescent creature
at our feet. The glowworm was a safety-
lamp, stuck on a ledge in the coal above him; the
drab hat-brush was a few inches of flesh near
this Ethiop's arms, not encrusted in black,
and which naturally moved backwards and
forwards as its owner plied his pickaxe and
enlarged the cavity he crouched in. The central
hall of my imagination resolved itself into
a solitary tomb. This was the only miner we
saw at work; though the Twin assured us there
were some three hundred and fifty in the pit