mutual praises, and their courage well-approved; and the only
result of the expedition was to confirm John Fry's repute as a bigger
liar than ever.

Now I had enough of that underground work, as before related, to last me
for a year to come; neither would I, for sake of gold, have ever stepped
into that bucket, of my own goodwill again. But when I told Lorna--whom
I could trust in any matter of secrecy, as if she had never been a
woman--all about my great descent, and the honeycombing of the earth,
and the mournful noise at eventide, when the gold was under the crusher
and bewailing the mischief it must do, then Lorna's chief desire was to
know more about Simon Carfax.

'It must be our Gwenny's father,' she cried; 'the man who disappeared
underground, and whom she has ever been seeking. How grieved the poor
little thing will be, if it should turn out, after all, that he left his
child on purpose! I can hardly believe it; can you, John?'

'Well,' I replied; 'all men are wicked, more or less, to some extent;
and no man may say otherwise.'

For I did not wish to commit myself to an opinion about Simon, lest I
might be wrong, and Lorna think less of my judgment.

But being resolved to see this out, and do a good turn, if I could, to
Gwenny, who had done me many a good one, I begged my Lorna to say not a
word of this matter to the handmaiden, until I had further searched
it out. And to carry out this resolve, I went again to the place of
business where they were grinding gold as freely as an apothecary at his
pills.

Having now true right of entrance, and being known to the watchman, and
regarded (since I cracked the boulder) as one who could pay his footing,
and perhaps would be the master, when Uncle Ben should be choked with
money, I found the corb sent up for me rather sooner than I wished it.
For the smell of the places underground, and the way men's eyes came out
of them, with links, and brands, and flambeaux, instead of God's light
to look at, were to me a point of caution, rather than of pleasure.

No doubt but what some men enjoy it, being born, like worms, to dig, and
to live in their own scoopings. Yet even the worms come up sometimes,
after a good soft shower of rain, and hold discourse with one another;
whereas these men, and the horses let down, come above ground never.

And the changing of the sky is half the change our nature calls for.
Earth we have, and all its produce (moving from the first appear