tortuous
valley in the centre. Up this the little train was slowly crawling.

The oil lamps had just been lit in the leading passenger car, a long,
bare carriage in which some twenty or thirty people were seated. The
greater number of these were workmen returning from their day's toil in
the lower part of the valley. At least a dozen, by their grimed faces
and the safety lanterns which they carried, proclaimed themselves
miners. These sat smoking in a group and conversed in low voices,
glancing occasionally at two men on the opposite side of the car, whose
uniforms and badges showed them to be policemen.

Several women of the labouring class and one or two travellers who might
have been small local storekeepers made up the rest of the company, with
the exception of one young man in a corner by himself. It is with this
man that we are concerned. Take a good look at him; for he is worth it.

He is a fresh-complexioned, middle-sized young man, not far, one would
guess, from his thirtieth year. He has large, shrewd, humorous gray eyes
which twinkle inquiringly from time to time as he looks round through
his spectacles at the people about him. It is easy to see that he is of
a sociable and possibly simple disposition, anxious to be friendly to
all men. Anyone could pick him at once as gregarious in his habits and
communicative in his nature, with a quick wit and a ready smile. And yet
the man who studied him more closely might discern a certain firmness
of jaw and grim tightness about the lips which would warn him that there
were depths beyond, and that this pleasant, brown-haired young Irishman
might conceivably leave his mark for good or evil upon any society to
which he was introduced.

Having made one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and
receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to
uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the fading
landscape.

It was not a cheering prospect. Through the growing gloom there pulsed
the red glow of the furnaces on the sides of the hills. Great heaps of
slag and dumps of cinders loomed up on each side, with the high shafts
of the collieries towering above them. Huddled groups of mean, wooden
houses, the windows of which were beginning to outline themselves in
light, were scattered here and there along the line, and the frequent
halting places were crowded with their swarthy inhabitants.

The iron and coal valleys of the Vermissa