our hair matted and dripping;
beads of perspiration streaming down our faces, we reach the top at last;
and thank Heaven, that after two hours' absence deep down among those
terrible "diggins," we are permitted once more to feel the bracing air,
and to look upon the glorious light of day.

Our labours, however are not over. Distant rather more than an English
mile from Himmelsfurst are the extensive amalgamation works, the smelting
furnaces and refining ovens. Painfully fatigued as we are, we cannot
resist the temptation of paying them a brief visit. The road is dusty
and desolate; nor are the works themselves either striking or attractive.
An irregular mass of sheds, brick buildings, and tall chimneys, present
themselves. As we approach them we come upon a "sludge hole"--the bed of
a stream running from the dredging and jigging works; where, by the
agency of water, the ore is relieved of its earthy and other waste
matter, and the stream of water--allowed to run off in separate
channels--deposits, as it flows, the smaller particles washed away in the
first process. These are all carefully collected, and the veriest atom
of silver or lead extracted. It is only the coarser ores that undergo
this process; the richer deposits being pulverised and smelted with white
or charred wood and fluxes, without the application of water, and refined
by amalgamation with quicksilver. The two metals are afterwards
separated by distilling off the latter.

Here are heaps of scoria--stacks of piglead, wood, coke, limestone and
waste earth, everything, indeed, but silver; although we are emphatically
in a silver mining district, silver is by no means the material which
presents itself in the greatest bulk. Having placed ourselves under the
direction of one of the workmen, we are led into some newly built brick
buildings, where force-pumps and other water appliances, erected at great
cost by the Saxon government, are gratefully pointed out to us. These
water-works are equally applicable to the extinction of fire, as to the
preparation of ores.

Into what an incomprehensible maze of words should we be betrayed, were
we to attempt a description of the multifarious operations for the
extraction and refining of metals! Every description of ore, or
metalliferous deposit, requires a different treatment: each suggested and
verified by laborious experience and vigilant attention. In some cases
the pure silver is separated by mechanical