chutes into the rail-cars on the road beneath. We tie our pony beside a
cinder-heap, and mount a ladder to the level of the huge platform above
the shaft. A constant supply of small hand-cars come up with demoniac
groans and shrieks from the bowels of the earth through the shaft. These
are instantly seized by the laborers and run over an iron floor to the
schute, where they are caught in titantic trammels, and overturned into
harsh thunder. Meanwhile the demon car-bringer has sunk again on its
errand; the suspending rope wheeling down with dizzy swiftness. As one
car-bearer descends, another rises to the surface with its twin
wheel-vessels of coal.

"Would you like to go down?"

"How far down?"

"Sixty fathoms."

Three hundred and sixty feet! Think of being suspended by a thread, from a
height twice that of Trinity's spire, and whirled into such a depth by
steam! We crawled into the little iron box, just large enough to allow us
to sit up with our heads against the top, both ends of our parachute being
open; the operator presses down a bar, and instantly the earth and sky
disappear, and we are wrapt in utter darkness. Oh? how sickening is this
sinking feeling! Down--down--down! What a gigantic dumb-waiter! Down,
down, a hot gust of vapor--a stifling sensation--a concussion upon the
iron floor at the foot of the shaft; a multitude of twinkling lamps, of
fiends, of grimy faces, and no bodies--and we are in a coal-mine.

There was a black, bituminous seat for visitors, sculptured out of the
coal, just beyond the shaft, and to this we were led by the carboniferous
fiends. My heart beat violently. I do not know how it went with Picton,
but we were both silent. Oh! for a glimpse of the blue sky and waving
trees above us, and a long breath of fresh air!

As soon as the stifling sensation passed away, we breathed more freely,
and the lungs became accustomed to the subterranean atmosphere. In the
gloom, we could see the smutted features only, of miners moving about, and
to heighten the Dantesque reality, new and strange sounds, from different
parts of the enormous cavern, came pouring towards the common centre--the
shaft of the coal-pit.

These were the laden cars on the tram-ways, drawn by invisible horses,
from the distant works in the mine, rolling and reverberating through the
infernal aisles of this devil's cathedral. One could scarcely help
recalling the old grandfather of Maud's Lord-lover:

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