he Midlands, the
lead mines of Derbyshire, of Allandale and other parts of
Northumberland, of Alston Moor and other parts of Cumberland, of
Arkendale and other parts of Yorkshire, of the western part of Durham,
of Salop, of Cornwall, of the Mendip Hills of Somersetshire, of Flint,
Cardigan, and Montgomery, of Lanark and Argyll, of the Isle of Man, of
Waterford and Down; I have gone down the 360-ft. Grand Pipe iron ladder
of the abandoned graphite-mine at Barrowdale in Cumberland, half-way up
a mountain 2,000 feet high; and visited where cobalt and manganese ore
is mined in pockets at the Foel Hiraeddog mine near Rhyl in Flintshire,
and the lead and copper Newton Stewart workings in Galloway; the Bristol
coal-fields, and mines of South Staffordshire, where, as in Somerset,
Gloucester, and Shropshire, the veins are thin, and the mining-system is
the 'long-wall,' whereas in the North, and Wales, the system is the
'pillar-and stall'; I have visited the open workings for iron ores of
Northamptonshire, and the underground stone-quarries, and the
underground slate-quarries, with their alternate pillars and chambers,
in the Festiniog district of North Wales; also the rock-salt workings;
the tin, copper and cobalt workings of Cornwall; and where the minerals
were brought to the surface on the backs of men, and where they were
brought by adit-levels provided with rail-roads, and where, as in old
Cornish mines, there are two ladders in the shaft, moved up and down
alternately, see-saw, and by skipping from one to the other at right
moments you ascended or descended, and where the drawing-up is by a gin
or horse-whinn, with vertical drum; the Tisbury and Chilmark quarries in
Wiltshire, the Spinkwell and Cliffwood quarries in Yorkshire; and every
tunnel, and every recorded hole: for something urged within me, saying:
'You must be sure first, or you can never be--yourself.'

* * * * *

At the Farnbrook Coal-field, in the Red Colt Pit, my inexperience nearly
ended my life: for though I had a minute theoretical knowledge of all
British workings, I was, in my practical relation to them, like a man
who has learnt seamanship on shore. At this place the dead were
accumulated, I think beyond precedent, the dark plain around for at
least three miles being as strewn as a reaped field with stacks, and,
near the bank, much more strewn than stack-fields, filling the only
house within sight of the pit-mouth--the sm