ving, however, ventured on reflection to assume the responsibility of
weakening our defence against the sea, by the length and breadth of an
inch, we secure our piece of copper, and next proceed to discuss the
propriety of descending two hundred and forty feet more of ladders, for
the sake of visiting that part of the mine where the men are at work.

Two or three causes concur to make us doubt the wisdom of going lower.
There is a hot, moist, sickly vapour floating about us, which becomes
more oppressive every moment; we are already perspiring at every pore,
as we were told we should; and our hands, faces, jackets, and trousers
are all more or less covered with a mixture of mud, tallow, and
iron-drippings, which we can feel and smell much more acutely than is
exactly desirable. We ask the miner what there is to see lower down. He
replies, nothing but men breaking ore with pickaxes; the galleries of
the mine are alike, however deep they may go; when you have seen one
you have seen all.

The answer decides us--we determine to get back to the surface.

We returned along the gallery, just as we had advanced, with the same
large allowance of scrambling, creeping, and stumbling on our way. I was
charitably carried along and down the platform over the pit, by my
trousers, as before; our order of procession only changing when we
gained the ladders again. Then, our friend the miner went last instead
of first, upon the same principle of being ready to catch us if we fell,
which led him to precede us on our descent. Except that one of the
rounds cracked under his weight as we went up, we ascended without
casualties of any kind. As we neared the mouth of the shaft, the
daylight atmosphere looked dazzlingly white, after the darkness in which
we had been groping so long; and when we once more stood out on the
cliff, we felt a cold, health-giving purity in the sea breeze, and, at
the same time, a sense of recovered freedom in the power that we now
enjoyed of running, jumping, and stretching our limbs in perfect
security, and with full space for action, which it was almost a new
sensation to experience. Habit teaches us to think little of the light
and air that we live and breathe in, or, at most, to view them only as
the ordinary conditions of our being. To find out that they are more
than this, that they are a luxury as well as a necessity of life, go
down into a mine, and compare what you _can_ exist in there, with what
you _do_ e