tors, warning wild and wicked speculators to
beware.

One day--it might have been night as far as our gloomy surroundings
indicated--Captain Jan and I were stumbling along one of the levels of
Botallack, I know not how many fathoms down. We wore miners' hats with
a candle stuck in front of each by means of a piece of clay. The hats
were thicker than a fireman's helmet, though by no means as elegant.
You might have plunged upon them head first without causing a dint.

Captain Jan stopped beside some fallen rocks. We had been walking for
more than an hour in these subterranean labyrinths and felt inclined to
rest.

"You were asking about the word _wheal_," said the captain, sticking his
candle against the wall of the level and sitting down on a ledge, "it do
signify a mine, as Wheal Frances, Wheal Owles, Wheal Edwards, and the
like. When Cornishmen do see a London Company start a mine on a grand
scale, with a deal of fuss and superficial show, and an imposing staff
of directors, etcetera, while, down in the mine itself, where the real
work ought to be done, perhaps only two men and a boy are known to be at
work, they shake their heads and button up their pockets; perhaps they
call the affair wheal _Do-em_, and when that mine stops, (becomes what
we call a `knacked bal') it may be styled wheal _Donem_!"

A traveller chanced to pass a water-wheel not long ago, near Saint Just.

"What's that?" he said to a miner who sat smoking his pipe beside it.

"That, sur? why, that's a pump, that is."

"What does it pump?" asked the traveller.

"Pump, sur?" replied the man with a grim smile, "why, et do pump gold
out o' the Londoners!"

There have been too many wheal _Do-ems_ in Cornwall.

Botallack mine is not, I need scarcely say, a wheal Do-em. It is a
grand old mine--grand because its beginning is enveloped in the mists of
antiquity; because it affords now, and has afforded for ages back,
sustenance to hundreds of miners and their families, besides enriching
the country; because its situation on the wild cliffs is unusually
picturesque, and because its dark shafts and levels not only descend to
an immense depth below the surface, but extend far out under the bottom
of the sea. Its engine-houses and machinery are perched upon the edge
of a steep cliff, and scattered over its face and down among its dark
chasms in places where one would imagine that only a sea-gull would dare
to venture.

Underground there exists a