re."

According to the usual method, the upper platform was brought to the
level of the ground, to receive its freight, before the cage was raised
the necessary seven feet, to allow Mr. Everett and the young people to
step on the lower floor. Then they slowly sank away from the light,
down, down, while Allie clutched Ned's protecting hand, and tried in
vain to enjoy her novel ride. At length they came to a halt at a broad,
square station, and the two decks of the cage were quickly unloaded.

"This is the nine-hundred level," Mr. Everett told them, as they stood
grouped about him. "We have three more below,--they're one hundred feet
apart, you know,--and we're still sinking the shaft. The cage in that
next compartment is given up to the men who are doing the sinking."

"It's a rich vein, then, I take it," said Dr. Brownlee.

"A fine one, better than we supposed when we bought it. It dips down
sharply to the east, and we cross it at the five-hundred, so we don't
have to work so far in any one direction to strike it. You see, we run a
cross-cut straight out from the shaft, till we hit the vein; then we
turn both ways and run along through it; so, at every level, our
workings are like a great T, with the stem growing larger with every
hundred feet we go down."

"And this is how deep?" asked Louise.

"Nine hundred," repeated her father, while he hastily snatched Marjorie
out of the path of an ore car, which came thundering down the cross-cut
and turned abruptly into the station.

"It's a solemn thing to feel that you are nine hundred feet from the
light," observed Mrs. Pennypoker, as she gathered her skirts more
closely about her.

"Yes," responded the Reverend Gabriel, waving his right hand, lamp and
all; "it reminds one of the mighty power of the earthquake, when it
stoops to trample on a worm."

Then they were silent, as they followed Mr. Everett through the long
gallery, pausing now and then near one of the electric lights that
dotted the corridor, to listen to his off-hand explanations of the work
below ground. Dr. Brownlee appeared to be especially interested in the
subject.

"How do you get the ore on the cage?" he asked. "Do you run it on, car
and all, or do you unload it?"

"How little these Eastern folks do know!" remarked the Reverend Gabriel,
in an audible aside to Louise.

"Perhaps we should all be better off, if we knew more about it," she
replied, with a touch of coldness in her tone, as she tur