Solomon replied, with affected carelessness;
"No, not as I know on; nothing particular."

Then Trevethick broke in with, "What! not when you was shut up in the
seam at Dunston?"

"Oh yes, to be sure," said Sol, as though the recollection of the
circumstance had only just occurred to him; "there was _that_,
certainly; but it was when I was quite a boy. I was not quite seventeen
when Dunston Colliery was drowned. The Gatton poured right in upon it,
and they have not got the water out of it in places to this day. It was
always said that the pit was being worked too near the river; but that
was little thought about by those as was most concerned, and it never
disturbed the head of a lad like me, of course. It was in the afternoon
of the 12th of December, a date as I am not likely to forget, when the
thing happened. Two mates--one old man and a middle-aged one--and myself
were at work in a heading together, when suddenly we heard a noise like
thunder. 'That's never blasting,' says one. 'The Lord have mercy on us,'
cries the other; 'it's the river come in at last!' For, as I say, the
risk was quite well known, though it was considered small, and made a
frequent jest of. Nothing that ever I heard was equal to that noise; the
waves in Gethin caverns here, during storm, are a whisper to it; the
whole pit seemed to be roaring in upon us. We all ran up the gallery,
which, fortunately for us, had a great slope, and crouched down at the
end of it. We heard the water pouring in and filling all the workings
beneath us, and then pouring in and filling ours. It reached our feet,
and left us but a very limited space, in which the air was compressed,
when the noise of the inundation ceased. There was a singing in our
ears, so that we could scarcely hear one another speak. We knew that the
whole mine had become a lake by that time, and that it would take months
to drain her, if she was ever drained. We knew that we were buried alive
hundreds of feet beneath the earth; and yet we did not quite lose heart.
There was this gleam of hope: supposing that the next gallery, which was
on a higher level than our own, was not also flooded, we could be got at
through the seam. We did not know the fact that it was more than sixty
feet of solid coal, and would have taken under ordinary circumstances at
least four weeks to dig through; we only knew that, if a door of escape
was to open any where, it must open there. We kept tapping with the
heels of our