oyment to the settlers when in their room, well lighted
with candles, well warmed with coal, after a good dinner, elderberry
coffee smoking in the cups, the pipes giving forth an odoriferous smoke,
they could hear the storm howling without. Their comfort would have been
complete, if complete comfort could ever exist for those who are far
from their fellow-creatures, and without any means of communication with
them. They often talked of their country, of the friends whom they had
left, of the grandeur of the American Republic, whose influence could
not but increase; and Cyrus Harding, who had been much mixed up with the
affairs of the Union, greatly interested his auditors by his recitals,
his views, and his prognostics.

It chanced one day that Spilett was led to say--

"But now, my dear Cyrus, all this industrial and commercial movement
to which you predict a continual advance, does it not run the danger of
being sooner or later completely stopped?"

"Stopped! And by what?"

"By the want of coal, which may justly be called the most precious of
minerals."

"Yes, the most precious indeed," replied the engineer; "and it would
seem that nature wished to prove that it was so by making the diamond,
which is simply pure carbon crystallized."

"You don't mean to say, captain," interrupted Pencroft, "that we burn
diamonds in our stoves in the shape of coal?"

"No, my friend," replied Harding.

"However," resumed Gideon Spilett, "you do not deny that some day the
coal will be entirely consumed?"

"Oh! the veins of coal are still considerable, and the hundred
thousand miners who annually extract from them a hundred millions of
hundredweights have not nearly exhausted them."

"With the increasing consumption of coal," replied Gideon Spilett, "it
can be foreseen that the hundred thousand workmen will soon become two
hundred thousand, and that the rate of extraction will be doubled."

"Doubtless; but after the European mines, which will be soon worked more
thoroughly with new machines, the American and Australian mines will for
a long time yet provide for the consumption in trade."

"For how long a time?" asked the reporter.

"For at least two hundred and fifty or three hundred years."

"That is reassuring for us, but a bad look-out for our
great-grandchildren!" observed Pencroft.

"They will discover something else," said Herbert.

"It is to be hoped so," answered Spilett, "for without coal there would
be no mac