wn a thousand feet or so of narrow tunnel in a
moment--imagine all this, and you may easily realize what are the first
impressions produced by a descent into a Cornish mine.

By the time we had got down seventy fathoms, or four hundred and twenty
feet of perpendicular ladders, we stopped at another landing-place, just
broad enough to afford standing room for us three. Here, the miner,
pointing to an opening yawning horizontally in the rock at one side of
us, said that this was the first gallery from the surface; that we had
done with the ladders for the present; and that a little climbing and
crawling were now to begin.

Our path was a strange one, as we advanced through the rift. Rough
stones of all sizes, holes here, and eminences there, impeded us at
every yard. Sometimes, we could walk on in a stooping position--sometimes,
we were obliged to crawl on our hands and knees. Occasionally, greater
difficulties than these presented themselves. Certain parts of the
gallery dipped into black, ugly-looking pits, crossed by thin planks,
over which we walked dizzily, a little bewildered by the violent contrast
between the flaring light that we carried above us, and the pitch darkness
beneath and before us. One of these places terminated in a sudden rising
in the rock, hollowed away below, but surmounted by a narrow projecting
wooden platform, to which it was necessary to climb by cross-beams
arranged at wide distances. My companion ascended to this awkward
elevation, without hesitating; but I came to an "awful pause" before it.
Fettered as I was by my Brobdingnag jacket and trousers, I felt a
humiliating consciousness that any extraordinary gymnastic exertion was
altogether out of my power.

Our friend the miner saw my difficulty, and extricated me from it at
once, with a promptitude and skill which deserve record. Descending half
way by the beams, he clutched with one hand that hinder part of my too
voluminous nether garments, which presented the broadest superficies of
canvas to his grasp (I hope the delicate reader appreciates my ingenious
indirectness of expression, when I touch on the unmentionable subject of
trousers!). Grappling me thus, and supporting himself by his free hand,
he lifted me up as easily as if I had been a small parcel; then carried
me horizontally along the loose boards, like a refractory little boy
borne off by the usher to the master's birch; or--considering the candle
burning on my hat, and the nec