er fallen into some crevice? Could his voice no longer reach his
companions?

The old overman, dead to their remonstrances, was about to enter the
opening, when a light appeared, dim at first, but gradually growing
brighter, and Harry's voice was heard shouting, "Come, Mr. Starr! come,
father! The road to New Aberfoyle is open!"

If, by some superhuman power, engineers could have raised in a block,
a thousand feet thick, all that portion of the terrestrial crust which
supports the lakes, rivers, gulfs, and territories of the counties of
Stirling, Dumbarton, and Renfrew, they would have found, under that
enormous lid, an immense excavation, to which but one other in the
world can be compared--the celebrated Mammoth caves of Kentucky. This
excavation was composed of several hundred divisions of all sizes and
shapes. It might be called a hive with numberless ranges of cells,
capriciously arranged, but a hive on a vast scale, and which, instead
of bees, might have lodged all the ichthyosauri, megatheriums, and
pterodactyles of the geological epoch.

A labyrinth of galleries, some higher than the most lofty cathedrals,
others like cloisters, narrow and winding--these following a
horizontal line, those on an incline or running obliquely in all
directions--connected the caverns and allowed free communication between
them.

The pillars sustaining the vaulted roofs, whose curves allowed of every
style, the massive walls between the passages, the naves themselves
in this layer of secondary formation, were composed of sandstone and
schistous rocks. But tightly packed between these useless strata ran
valuable veins of coal, as if the black blood of this strange mine had
circulated through their tangled network. These fields extended forty
miles north and south, and stretched even under the Caledonian
Canal. The importance of this bed could not be calculated until
after soundings, but it would certainly surpass those of Cardiff and
Newcastle.

We may add that the working of this mine would be singularly facilitated
by the fantastic dispositions of the secondary earths; for by an
unaccountable retreat of the mineral matter at the geological epoch,
when the mass was solidifying, nature had already multiplied the
galleries and tunnels of New Aberfoyle.

Yes, nature alone! It might at first have been supposed that some works
abandoned for centuries had been discovered afresh. Nothing of the sort.
No one would have deserted such