at which was presented at night. There is
no beauty now, and little of the picturesque. The first impression,
indeed, the mind is apt to receive, is that of a sense of painful
weariness. Hundreds of chimneys--we speak literally--are vomiting
forth that white, peculiar-looking, and unmistakable vapour called
copper-smoke. Enormous masses of that ugly, black, silicious refuse,
known in the smelting vocabulary as 'slag,' is piled above and around
in such quantity as to change even the physical appearance of the
country.

But this is not all. The noxious gases--which we see and feel around
us--evolved in the reduction of copper, have not played so long on the
surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within
their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The
hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren
in the extreme. Not one spark of green, not one solitary lichen, can
withstand the ravages of the poison. Time was, we were told by an old
inhabitant, when these hills produced the earliest and finest corn in
the principality; but now they only resemble enormous piles of sandy
gravel, unbroken but by the rugged angles on the face of the rock. In
the year 1822, the inhabitants of Swansea took legal steps to abate
the nuisance. A reward of L.1000 was likewise offered for the
discovery of a successful means of neutralising the effect of the
vapour. The Messrs Vivian of the Hafod Works spent the princely sum of
L.14,000 in experiments, some of which were partially successful, and
are still adopted; but after all, it must be confessed that the fumes
of sulphurous acid, and of numerous other acids alike poisonous in
their character, still taint the atmosphere of the Swansea valley, and
still leave the indelible traces of their blasting properties.

The Hafod Works are the largest in South Wales. Situated on the north
side of the river, they cover a superficial extent of about twenty
acres. The number of furnaces, chimneys, and other brick erections
contained in the works, was far beyond our computation; and we can
speak feelingly of the devious ways and labyrinth of bypaths with
which they are intersected, since, on more than one occasion, we
became bewildered in their mazes.

Here was a group of workmen, half-naked, pouring out of a furnace the
liquid copper at a white heat; there was another group with a red-hot
copper-plate of colossal weight and dimensions, which the