tions. A fox or a rabbit always has a second
hole by which he can escape if there is anything wrong with the first.
Ours is without doubt a dangerous pit, and if anything happened to block
the shaft, the poor fellows down below would be entombed."

"Yes, my boy," said Mr Hexton grimly; "but it doesn't cost the rabbits
or the foxes ten thousand pounds to make their second hole. It would
cost us that. We must be content with one."

That question of a second shaft was always cropping up in Philip
Hexton's brain, for, said he to himself, it is a sin against four
hundred men to let them go down that place without providing them with
proper means of escape. But upon going into calculations he found that
the cost of a second shaft would approach the ten thousand pounds before
all was ready, and he knew that the proprietors would not listen to such
a proposition. What, then, was to be done?

The answer came to him one evening like a flash of thought; and,
starting off, he made his way through the scrubby patch of woodland on
the hill-slope joining the colliery lands to the next property.

It took him some time to find that of which he was in search, for the
neglected ground was overgrown with tangled brambles, hazels, and
pollards; and a stranger would have at once looked upon the wilderness
of a place as unturned ground. But Philip knew better. He was growing
weary of his search, however, when he made his discovery in a fashion
that he did not anticipate, for, just as he was forcing his way through
a tangled part of the wood, and parting the shady hazel stubbs that
arrested his progress, his feet seemed to drop suddenly from beneath
him, and he went down into semi-darkness, to hang clinging with the
energy of despair to the hazel boughs; while, had he had any doubt about
his position as he swung gently to and fro, he was taught by the
horrible echoing plash that came up from hundreds of feet below, as the
mass of crumbling earth and roots, upon which he had stepped, fell into
the water.

For a few moments the horror of his position seemed to paralyse him, and
such a strange sense of terror mastered his faculties that he felt that
he must lose his hold and fall into the depths, to be drowned in a few
moments in the awful pit. For this was the place of which he had been
in search--the shaft of the old colliery, that had not been worked for
quite a hundred years; a place almost forgotten, but of whose existence
he wa