insure them and their children happiness and prosperity; and in so doing
you will teach a sound, practical permanent lesson."

"But," interrupted the Clergyman, "if we continue the conversation
longer, we shall ourselves become transgressors; the 'stirrup-cup' is
drained; much remains doubtless to be said respecting the evils,
physical and moral, which arise from intemperance; but let us now
adjourn."

"With all my heart!" exclaimed the host, "and now, 'to all and each, a
fair good night.'"

From "Rambles beyond Railways;" by W. Wilkie Collins, author of
"Antonina."

MINING UNDER THE SEA.

In complete mining equipment, with candles stuck by lumps of clay to
their felt hats, the travellers have painfully descended by
perpendicular ladders and along dripping-wet rock passages, fathoms down
into pitchy darkness; the miner who guides them calls a halt.

We are now four hundred yards out under the bottom of the sea, and
twenty fathoms or a hundred and twenty feet below the sea level.
Coast-trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty
feet beneath us men are at work; and there are galleries deeper yet even
below that. The extraordinary position down the face of the cliff, of
the engines and other works on the surface at Botallack, is now
explained. The mine is not excavated like other mines under the land,
but under the sea.

Having communicated these particulars, the miner next tells us to keep
strict silence and listen. We obey him, sitting speechless and
motionless. If the reader could only have beheld us now, dressed in our
copper-colored garments, huddled close together in a mere cleft of
subterranean rock, with flame burning on our heads and darkness
enveloping our limbs, he must certainly have imagined, without any
violent stretch of fancy, that he was looking down upon a conclave of
gnomes.

After listening for a few moments, a distant unearthly noise becomes
faintly audible,--a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes,
that is felt on the ear as well as heard by it; a sound that might
proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height;
a sound unlike any thing that is heard on the upper ground in the free
air of heaven; a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and
impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth,
that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it,
and think not of communicating to