We left him (humanly speaking) certain of recovery, now that the
dangerous lump in his side had begun to decrease. I heard afterwards
from his medical attendant, that in two months from the date of the
accident, he was at work again as usual in the mine; at that very part
of it, too, where his fall had taken place!

It was not the least interesting part of my visit to the cottage where
he lay ill, to observe the anxious affection displayed towards him by
both his parents. His mother left her work in the kitchen to hold him in
her arms, while the old dressings were being taken off and the new ones
applied--sighing bitterly, poor creature, every time he winced or cried
out under the pain of the operation. The father put several questions to
the doctor, which were always perfectly to the point; and did the
honours of his little abode to his stranger visitor, with a natural
politeness and a simple cordiality of manner which showed that he
really meant the welcome that he spoke. Nor was he any exception to the
rest of his brother-workmen with whom I met. As a body of men, they are
industrious and intelligent; sober and orderly; neither soured by hard
work, nor easily depressed by harder privations. No description of
personal experiences in the Cornish mines can be fairly concluded,
without a collateral testimony to the merits of the Cornish miners--a
testimony which I am happy to accord here; and to which my readers would
cheerfully add their voices, if they ever felt inclined to test its
impartiality by their own experience.

X.

THE MODERN DRAMA IN CORNWALL.

Our walk from Botallack Mine to St. Ives, led us almost invariably
between moors and hills on one side, and cliffs and sea on the other;
and displayed some of the dreariest views that we had yet beheld in
Cornwall. About nightfall, we halted for a short time at a place which
was certainly not calculated to cheer the traveller along his onward
way.

Imagine three or four large, square, comfortless-looking, shut-up
houses, all apparently uninhabited; add some half-dozen miserable little
cottages standing near the houses, with the nasal notes of a Methodist
hymn pouring disastrously through the open door of one of them; let the
largest of the large buildings be called an inn, but let it make up no
beds, because nobody ever stops to sleep there: place in the kitchen of
this inn a sickly little girl, and a middle-aged, melancholy woman, the
first staring