BOOK

BOOK III

Book 3 Chapter 1

The last rays of the sun, contending with clouds of smoke that drifted
across the country, partially illumined a peculiar landscape. Far as
the eye could reach, and the region was level, except where a range of
limestone hills formed its distant limit, a wilderness of cottages or
tenements that were hardly entitled to a higher name, were scattered for
many miles over the land; some detached, some connected in little rows,
some clustering in groups, yet rarely forming continuous streets, but
interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal, and piles
of smouldering ironstone; while forges and engine chimneys roared and
puffed in all directions, and indicated the frequent presence of the
mouth of the mine and the bank of the coal-pit. Notwithstanding
the whole country might be compared to a vast rabbit warren, it was
nevertheless intersected with canals crossing each other at various
levels, and though the subterranean operations were prosecuted with so
much avidity that it was not uncommon to observe whole rows of
houses awry, from the shifting and hollow nature of the land, still,
intermingled with heaps of mineral refuse or of metallic dross, patches
of the surface might here and there be recognised, covered, as if in
mockery, with grass and corn, looking very much like those gentlemen's
sons that we used to read of in our youth, stolen by the chimneysweeps
and giving some intimations of their breeding beneath their grimy
livery. But a tree or a shrub--such an existence was unknown in this
dingy rather than dreary region.

It was the twilight hour; the hour at which in southern climes the
peasant kneels before the sunset image of the blessed Hebrew maiden;
when caravans halt in their long course over vast deserts, and the
turbaned traveller bending in the sand, pays his homage to the sacred
stone and the sacred city; the hour, not less holy, that announces the
cessation of English toil, and sends forth the miner and the collier to
breathe the air of earth, and gaze on the light of heaven.

They come forth: the mine delivers its gang and the pit its bondsmen;
the forge is silent and the engine is still. The plain is covered
with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and
muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics;
troops of youth--alas! of both sexes,--though neither their raiment nor
their language indicates th