ates?"

"Well?" answered the traveller, interrogatively.

"We would make niggers work it."

"I dare say," replied Picton, drily and satirically; "but, sir, I am proud
to say that our government does not tolerate barbarity; to consign an
inoffensive fellow-creature to such horrible labor, merely because he is
black, is at variance with the well-known humanity of the whole British
nation, sir."

"But those miners, Picton, were black as the devil himself."

"The miners," replied Picton, with impressive gravity, "are black, but not
negroes."

"Nothing but mere white people, Picton?"

"Eh?" said the traveller.

"Only white people, and therefore we need not waste one grain of sympathy
over a whole pit full of them."

"Why not?"

"Because they are not niggers, what is the use of wasting sympathy upon a
rat-hole full of white British subjects?"

"I tell you what it is," said Picton, "you are getting personal."

We were now rolling past the dingy tenements again. Squalid-looking,
care-worn women, grimy children:

"To me there's something touching, I confess,
In the grave look of early thoughtfulness,
Seen often in some little childish face,
Among the poor;"--

But these children's faces are not such. A child's face--God bless it!
should always have a little sunshine in its glance; but these are mere
staring faces, without expression, that make you shudder and feel sad.
Miners by birth; human moles fitted to burrow in darkness for a life-time.
Is it worth living for? No wonder those swart laborers underground are so
grim and taciturn: no wonder there was not a face lighted up by those
smoky lamps in the pit, that had one line of human sympathy left in its
rigidly engraved features!

But we must have coal, and we must have cotton. The whole plantations of
the South barely supply the press with paper; and the messenger of
intelligence, the steam-ship, but for coal could not perform its glorious
mission. What is to be done, Picton? If every man is willing to give up
his morning paper, wear a linen shirt, cross the ocean in a clipper-ship,
and burn wood in an open fire-place, something might be done.

As Picton's steamer (probably fog-bound) had not yet arrived in Sydney,
nor yet indeed the "Balaklava," the traveller determined to take a
Newfoundland brigantine for St. John's, from which port there are vessels
to all parts of the world. After leaving horse and jumper with the
inn-keeper, we took