yellow block from which the first piece of copper had been
extracted. All his contemporaries who were not dead had grown old around
him, and he himself, decrepit and bent, was still alive and even worked,
as far as his strength permitted.

"Old Ivan is a true miner; he was born in a gallery of the old mine,"
the workmen often said to one another. They had forgotten for a long
time past where the old worked-out mine which had been abandoned sixty
years ago was situated. His disuse of speech only augmented the respect
they felt for him. Some even thought that his silence was in consequence
of a vow. "He is Ivan the Silent," they would say. "Disbelieve it if
you like, but it is quite ten years since he has been silent."

Meanwhile the bucket suspended from the chain which rattled
remorselessly continued to descend. The greyish patch of the orifice was
no more visible at all, and its last vague glimmer had been swallowed up
in the damp cold darkness of the pit. The wooden lining had come to an
end, and the walls were formed of strata of different metals. On one
hand the sides and sharp edges of a great black stone projected, on the
other was damp mud encrusted with fragments of rock. Then the pale light
of the little lamp glided windingly over the rounded outlines of flint
fossils. It then zigzagged over a layer of brilliant white mineral,
which was soon succeeded by another of mud.

Through all--the earth, the flints, the edges of rent rocks--there
trickled innumerable water-drops. Was it the blood of the earth
escaping from a deep wound? Or was it shedding tears over the hard lot
of hundreds of men shut up in the eternal darkness of its mysterious
kingdom?

The tears fell thickly, one by one, forming threads of water, which in
their turn formed rivulets. Now the old man heard something else beside
the creaking of the rusted chain, every link of which seemed to be
complaining of extreme weariness, the result of long service. His ear,
accustomed to silence, caught the murmur of rivulets, and the noise of
water-drops, falling one by one, resembling the sound of grains of lead
falling on stone. Here is a spring which has escaped from its narrow
prison in the heart of the mountain and which forms a wide stream, but
which, finding on its escape from its long bondage only darkness as deep
as that of its prison, seems to moan as it glides over the damp stones.

The bucket continued its descent. He could no longer see above o