gently
needed; and the door is so much too small for its sill and lintels as to
leave large chinks, through which adventurous bees and beetles may find
their way within. You may see at a glance that there is but one room, and
that there can be no up-stairs to the hut, except that upper storey of
the broad, open common behind it, where the birds sleep softly in their
cosy nests. Before the house is a garden; and beyond that a small field
sown with silver oats, which are dancing and glistening in the breeze and
sunshine; while before the garden wicket, but not enclosed from the
common, is a warm, sunny valley, in the very middle of which a slender
thread of a brook widens into a lovely little basin of a pool, clear and
cold, the very place for the hill ponies to come and drink.

Looking steadily up this pleasant valley from the threshold of the
cottage, we can just see a fine, light film of white smoke against the
blue sky. Two miles away, right down off the mountains, there is a small
coal-field and a quarry of limestone. In a distant part of the country
there are large tracts of land where coal and iron pits are sunk on every
side, and their desolate and barren pit-banks extend for miles round,
while a heavy cloud of smoke hangs always in the air. But here, just at
the foot of these mountains, there is one little seam of coal, as if
placed for the express use of these people, living so far away from the
larger coal-fields. The Botfield lime and coal works cover only a few
acres of the surface; but underground there are long passages bored
beneath the pleasant pastures and the yellow cornfields. From the
mountains, Botfield looks rather like a great blot upon the fair
landscape, with its blackened engine-house and banks of coal-dust, its
long range of limekilns, sultry and quivering in the summer sunshine, and
its heavy, groaning water-wheel, which pumps up the water from the pits
below. But the colliers do not think it so, nor their wives in the
scattered village beyond; they do not consider the lime and coal works a
blot, for their living depends upon them, and they may rightly say, 'As
for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it
were fire.'

Even Stephen Fern, who would a thousand times rather work out on the free
hillside than in the dark passages underground, does not think it a pity
that the Botfield pit has been discovered at the foot of the mountains.
It is nearly seven o'clock in the